Eventide Music Mouse with Dual Akemie's Castles
'Music Mouse' is a computer program that turns your computer into an intelligent musical instrument. It's played by pushing the music around in real time with the computer's mouse while accessing the realtime control options from the computer's keyboard.
Music Mouse was originally written in the mid 1980s by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel for the Apple Mac. It was soon ported to both the Atari ST and Amiga computers. Five years ago we created our original Amiga Music Mouse video using the classic version to control a pair of Akemie's Castles.
Eventide has recently worked with Laurie Spiegel to update the Music Mouse software to run on modern computer hardware as a standalone application. Read all about here.
To celebrate the release of the new updated Music Mouse, we've used the new version to create a similar patch, this time sequencing from a modern M3 Mac, also using dual Akemie's Castles - our module based on technology from the same era bought into the now.
In this patch the MIDI produced by Music Mouse was converted to CV and Gate via two mmMidi’s connected directly to the iMac with USB-C. The four CV outs were connected to the V/Oct pitch inputs of the four FM oscillators of the Akemie’s Castles whose outputs were each connected to a channel of the MEGA-TANG quad VCA and mixer. The four gate outs from the mmMidi’s were connected directly to the four inputs of the first Pamela’s PRO Workout, set up to act like a triggered polyphonic envelope. The four vertical output pairs of Pam were set to all use the special Trigger modifier assigned to Clock, Run, CV1 and CV2 respectfully, producing two envelopes to control FM depth and VCA level for each of the four Castle voices.
The second Pam was set up as a slow octature LFO, producing 8 phase offset triangle wave LFO’s which were patched to control the Wave and Multiplier parameters of the Castle voices. Once the second Pam was started, the timbre immediately brightened from the sweeping modulation, layering with the unique blooming arpeggiations produced by Music Mouse. Finally, using the send of the MEGA-TANG, a large spacious reverb from the MFX’s Almicon engine was added, creating a lush space around the voices. The patch was tweaked alongside gestures from the mouse and keyboard, for a one of a kind composition only Music Mouse could produce.
Get the new Eventide Music Mouse here!
