As an amateur musician I am always drawn to interesting musical oddities. Whilst Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) are where most music is creates these days there is room for entry, educational tools to help budding gamers and musicians learn and play. Enter Dream Gen. Part visualiser, part audio creator, it dabbles in one very specific type of music – polyrhythms.
Polyrhythms are beats or melodies that start off in unison but run to different time signatures or speeds. This means they’ll slowly separate out and then converge back together over time. The result is that the music is forever changing and it never stays still. Often hypnotic and beautiful, you’ll hear them often in African and Caribbean music.
Dream Gen is a polyrhythm generator. You select a sound from a small bank piano and synth samples and pick from a selection of polyrhythm types. Some are metronomic like clocks and others are like music boxes or waves tables. From there you can add in up to 100 notes and 8 chords that evenly space themselves out and you can change the speed of the melody and how quickly convergences occur. There are also some filter and frequency effects to add radio hiss or watery distortion.
Then you press play, listen and tweak away to your hearts content.
Each visualiser has colour customisation and particle effects to modify. It oddly makes listening your output more satisfying as particles splash around the screen. You can also get quite a lot of sounds from a very small sample bank too. If you really like what you’ve made you can save it to listen and watch back in the future. Musicians can also export the polyrhythm in MIDI format to then drag into your DAW of choice. This is really Dream Gen’s biggest selling point but I ran into repeated technical issues getting anything to export. Hopefully some documentation and improvement will help during its early access phase.
My main thoughts about Dream Gen are that it’s pretty, potentially a great way to visualise a musical concept for people, but ultimately very niche and limited by design. I’d get the most use out of it by exporting MIDI files out and using them with other digital instruments in my DAW. That’s fine but a lot of digital instruments allow this anyway so the use case is really small. It is very approachable and easy to get something immediately pleasing up and running in seconds though and that is a great educational achievement.
Whilst limited in scope and use case, Dream Gen is fun to muck about with. You can use it for idea sketches or to just melodically soothe you like a Winamp visualiser. I’m glad it exists even if I don’t have many practical uses for it. A real curio.
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