The Tonfall Flash based sequencer
Justin Windle at Soulwire posted a nice particle node sequencer created in Flash using the Tonfall Audio Engine, the new open source AS3 audio engine produced by Andre Michelle.
At Flash on the Beach this year, I had the privilege of seeing Andre Michelle speak. It was great to hear him explain some of his fantastic work behind audiotool and to see and hear some more of his audio experiments.
He also introduced Tonfall, which is an open source AS3 framework designed to get people started with Audio programming in Flash. From the horses mouth; “Tonfall introduces only a vague design of an audio engine and is rather focussed on readability and simplicity than performance optimizations”.
I know that I’m not alone in feeling inspired by what Andre has done for the Flash platform, particularly when it comes to audio, yet lack the knowledge he has invested so much time and hard work in acquiring. The fact that he’s now sharing it with the ret of us for free was more than enough impetus to have a crack at it myself.
So this is my first test with the framework, which although not extensively documented (at the time of writing), was quite easy to pick up and get going with.
This sequencer is based around physical nodes, which connect to produce a variety of tones. There are two types of node, a neuron and a receptor, which are connected by synapses (apologies for the trite analogies). Neurons fire periodically, and if within a certain proximity of a receptor, this message is sent at a fixed speed along the bridging synapse. When the message arrives, the receptor is activated and responds by queuing it’s individual tone within the audio engine. Each receptor owns a randomly assigned note, and each neuron a randomly assigned octave; therefor a receptor will play it’s note in several different octaves depending on which neuron causes it to fire.
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