Midi CC oscillators from Quartz Composer
Hey there, it’s Steve Cooley from Haptic Synapses and Beatseqr.com.
Here’s a trick that I’ve been playing around with using quartz composer to generate curve data and send it out to osculator, and then from there you can send it out as midi cc to whatever music app you want that will accept that data to control various things. It’s pretty neat, and there’s a lot of room for exploration here. As required by the Rules of Ideas Being Spread On the Internet, we have to have a silly name for this, so let’s call this a “quartzillator”.
Load up quartz composer. I think even 10.4 had the OSC sender patch, so it should work that far back. 10.5, 10.6, and presumably every version after should be able to do this.
In a blank composition, place an “interpolation” patch and an “OSC Sender” patch. The options of these patches are ok at the default, just find out what port quartz composer is going to be using to send the OSC data out on so you can tell Osculator to listen on that port. Add a new float OSC argument with whatever name you want.. I called mine “/oscillator”.
listen to the port sent from QC in osculator and set it up as MIDI CC
Connect the interpolation patch’s Result output port to the OSC argument’s input port. Quartz Composer is now sending curve data out on that udp port with that argument.
Connecting the interpolation patch to the OSC send patch
Launch Osculator and set the OSC Input Port to whatever the output port number was in the OSC Sender patch in quartz composer.  The argument that you made (in my case “/oscillator”) in QC should show up automagically. Set the event type to be a “MIDI CC” output and set the value to be zero (for now.. there may be some conflicts on some numbers you choose.. most seem to be ok).
listen to the port sent from QC in osculator and set it up as MIDI CC
Ok, so if everything is working correctly, you should be able to go to your music app of choice that will accept MIDI CC messages, and assign the new “quartzillator” to whatever parameter you like. Here’s a video of the effect in Propellerhead Reason… again, this should work in logic, live, reason, VSTs with midi learn, AU’s… pretty much anywhere that will accept midi cc.
ENJOY! Happy exploring!
