WaveDNA has released Liquid Music for Live, a plug-in for Ableton Live 9 that crafts original song ideas with advanced music tools.

Liquid Music is designed to allow users to paint melodies, harmonies and chords using the Sketch tool, and unique beats using a collection of rhythmic building blocks.

Liquid Music fully integrates with Ableton Live Suite or Ableton Live with Max for Live. Choose a synth track, and Liquid Music automatically displays the harmony toolset. Select a Drum Rack track, and Liquid Music supplies a wealth of beat sequencing tools. Liquid Music separates music into five layers, each with unique tools a user can tweak and customize to morph and evolve music: Sketch, Key, Chords, Voice and Rhythm:

• Sketch is where all the layers come together into one intuitive musical shape. Simply click and drag to create original harmonies, spark new song ideas and draw the shape of the music. Want the music to build? Draw a cresting peak. How about a big EDM drop? Plunge the mouse down and draw a valley.
• Key determines a track's "mood." Will it be an upbeat frolic through flower pastures with a major scale? A forlorn dirge in a minor key? Or maybe a trippy experimental journey of exotic tones with Ultralocrian or Phrygian b5 modes? A user can even transpose to better suit a vocalist—no music theory degree required.
• Liquid Music's Chord Suggester journeys deep into the land of known progressions to recommend complementary chord changes that help build progressions. Feed those to the Chord Sequencer to create clever chord progressions without hours of frustrating trial and error. The Chord Sequencer is like a drum sequencer for chords. Just choose or randomize a chord, and a list of complementary chords helps you arrange song.
• The Voice layer helps add the right amount of harmony to melodies and chords. A user can import a melody and use the Voice Layer to add harmony, create cascading arpeggios and even customize how thick the harmonies are for specific parts.
• Rhythm includes a host of tools based on WaveDNA's acclaimed Liquid Rhythm software. A user can experiment with new beats and customize their note duration, velocity, timing and more. Rhythm mode lets a user create unique, elaborate beats in seconds using an extensive list note patterns and clusters—entire bars at a time.

Included are presets to help create original ideas and rich harmonies, and a user can swap their five "layers" for nearly limitless possibilities.

Price: $199 - There is an introductory price of $129 US. Upgrade to Liquid Music from Liquid Rhythm for $59 US, MSRP $99 US.

 

Looks interesting. There are a number of other amazing and novel ways of representing music - Cognitone Synfire, and Karma-Lab's Karma system for example, both of which are more advanced than this.

The future of electronic music is going to be about dynamic composition, by that I mean instead of merely playing back a sampled waveform of music, we'll instead run a complete music generation suite and provide rules and structure to the music, but not strictly fixed like most compositions today. Alternate representations like this can certainly help in providing those rules.

Far thinking people like Brian Eno have been talking about this for years. Not to mention the live music we've had for centuries. ;-)

We're starting to see game music become more advanced, perhaps we will start to see sophisticated implementations of dynamic music composition within a decade. (Not just the dynamic layered approach they use now).

 

Last edited: Oct 1, 2015