Blip



What is Blip?

The concept behind Blip is to create innovative sounds and loops by drawing with the usual graphic tools (pencil, airbrush, line…). The classic painting functions take a whole other dimension, as they create melodies and rhythms in the musical domain.


How does it work ?

Blip continuously scans a grid of 64x64 cells. Each cell corresponds to a note, whose starting time is determined by its column, and whose instrument is determined by its row. The color of the cell controls the volume of the note (red component), its pan (green component), and its pitch (blue component).

Painting in the grid can be done in real-time while the loop is playing, which coupled with MIDI support and numerous shortcuts, transforms Blip into a very powerful live instrument. There are 16 patterns, each of them having its own tempo.

Blip can be used in many different ways. Here are a few of them:

  • with a lot of short percussive sounds to create glitchy patterns
  • with a slow tempo and long samples with fading envelopes to create complex ambiences
  • with simple tones and only a few painted cells to create wave sequences
  • with sine waves for additive / granular synthesis etc…



    • Audio & Video examples

    Here is a first video example of Blip in action. There will be more.

    Glitchy Rhythm Example #1

    And a few crazy loops, mostly done with random kits and functions. It is easy to generate such loops in a few clicks with Blip.

    alien club blipping bouncy
    chaos theory clockwork fusion 1
    fusion 2 fusion 3 fusion 4
    gameboy garbled transmission generator
    hypnopiano industry 1 industry 2
    message from Venus microsine minimize
    piano cascade radiooo space scare
    technopulse vacation on Mars


    Download & Installation

    Click here to download Blip. You just need to unzip the file and the program is ready. Make sure to read the PDF documentation, as it contains a lot of details, especially all the shortcuts to use Blip as a performance tool.

    If you get a message "This application failed to start...", you are are missing some dlls. Please install this and you will have everything you need to run Blip, and other Windows programs using the same dlls (it's small).


    History

    17/11/07 : version 1.1
        - webcam can be used to modify painted cells or acquire the whole grid
        - cellular automaton to make the pattern evolve
        - automatic generation of rhythmic patterns
        - easy creation of wavesequences
        - no more minimum size for the samples used by the slicer, and choice of the destination folder

    20/09/07 : version 1.0


    What is next ?

    While Blip is already a powerful tool, it opens doors to many exciting improvements and experiments.

    Features expected to appear in the next versions include:

  • Instruments with min and max notes, as well as a musical scale, to which the blue levels will be mapped, in order to sound more musical.
  • Digital audio effects (tempo-based delay, resonant filter, chorus…).
  • Alternate grids, in complement of the note grid, to change effect send levels, or to set the probability that one note will actually be played.
  • Procedural generation of grids.
  • Automatic evolution / mutation of the grid patterns for live performances.