Tuna
Generative music firmware for the M-VAVE FM-1, built on Felucca.
Tuna composes as it plays: Mutable Instruments Marbles' randomness, shaped by music theory into melody, bass, accompaniment and percussion, through Felucca's synthesis engines. Pick a composer and Tuna plays in that composer's manner, endlessly and never twice the same; or pick a character preset and let it drift, from still and ambient to driving and rhythmic.
Version 1.0: runs on the FM-1. Install it from the web installer at https://delirioux.github.io/tuna/ (Chrome or Edge, USB), or try it in the browser there first. Built for fun and with no warranty: Felucca's installer, or the official V15, takes the FM-1 back.
What is in it
- 86 popular genres in 8 decades, the 1950s to now: rock & roll and doo-wop, Motown, ska and funk, disco, reggae, punk and Bronx block parties, house, techno and new jack swing, grunge, jungle and trance, dubstep and grime, trap, drill, amapiano and hyperpop, phonk and Jersey club. Each has its own drum groove and kit, bass line, chord loop, comping and instruments; vocal genres play as their beat, bass, chords and a lead line.
- 89 composers and styles in 10 eras, from Hildegard von Bingen to today: Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Early Romantic, Romantic, Late Romantic, Modern, Minimal, Film & Stage, Contemporary. Each has its own harmony, melody, rhythm, form and instrumentation: chant on a drone, Bach's counterpoint, Satie's parallel chords, Debussy's whole tones, Gershwin's jazz chords, phasing patterns, tintinnabuli bells, Messiaen's octatonic modes and birdsong.
- Tuned from the scores: the melodies of 45 composers lean toward what 3,486 public-domain scores of theirs measure: how often a line repeats a note, steps or leaps, how wide and how high it goes, how busy it is.
- 285 manners: most composers wrote in several ways, and Tuna plays them all: Bach's fugues, chorales and gigues, Chopin's nocturnes, mazurkas, polonaises and études, Mozart's sonatas, arias, serenades and masses, Verdi's arias, choruses and Requiem. The seed picks the manner (each seed its own); LIBRARY's fourth knob fixes one.
- 93 instruments on Felucca's engines, each composer and genre with sets of its own: besides the orchestra, piano and band, a pipe organ and harmonium, harpsichord and lute, cimbalom and koto, sitar and oud, erhu and shakuhachi, pan flute and harmonica, accordion and bandoneon, vibraphone, glockenspiel and tubular bells, music box and toy piano, upright, slap and fretless bass, string machine, synth brass and a handful of 8-bit leads. Their levels are evened out, so any of them sits right in the mix.
- Odd meters and grouped beats: 3+3+2, 5/4, 7/8 and the like.
- Tunings: equal, meantone, Werckmeister, Pythagorean, just, and user-defined.
- 8 character presets without a composer, from STILL to DRIVE.
- Sequencer: freeze the period you hear into an editable pattern of up to 384 notes; trig conditions and up to 3 parameter locks per step; an evolution timer that builds an energy arc and modulates.
- 16 slots that save the whole state and play back exactly the music that was saved.
- MIDI out, every part on its own channel (bass 1, melody 2, pad 3, timpani 4, drums 10), with General MIDI programs for the instruments, the sound locks as controllers, historical tunings as pitch bend, and clock.
- A resonator: sympathetic strings on the mix in the manner of Rings, tuned to the chord, the key or the root, retuning as the harmony moves.
Controls
| Control | Does |
|---|---|
| PLAY | start / stop; always from the top (the same seed plays the same music) |
| SELECT / MASTER | tempo / volume |
| PRESETS / ALGORITHM | the library: piece by piece, or a whole era (or decade) at a time; playing, the new piece comes in at the next half of the period. Each piece brings its own tempo, key, percussion, evolution and reverb type, and a new random seed |
| KNOB 1–4 | the page's four cards; on HOME the chaos knobs: RHYTHM, PITCH, DENSITY and MACRO (0 is the composer exactly), on melody, bass and pad, each in its own way |
| keys | tap one: the root (from the next chord); hold several: that chord, while held; on SAVE / LOAD the 16 white keys are the slots |
| OCT− / OCT+ | the seed (256, a new one at every power-on): another piece in the same manner, playing from the next half of the period; on SAVE, LOAD and SEQ: back / do it |
| REC | memory: the phrase locked (deja vu) / the composer's own |
| HOME | the falling notes; held: the menu (colour, style) |
| FX · SCL · EDIT · ARP · SEQ · GLO · SAVE | library · key, scale, tuning, memory · time, then the parts, then which parts follow the chaos knobs · evolution · freeze · mix, then reverb (send, size, damping, type: BATHROOM, ROOM, HALL, CATHEDRAL, SPRING) · save, then load |
| ENV · LFO | MIDI out · the resonator |
Roadmap
| Phase | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Music theory core | done |
| 2 | Generator (Marbles port, harmonizer) | done |
| 3 | Coupling to Felucca's engines | done |
| 4 | Sequencer | done |
| 5 | Presets, slots, composers by era | done |
| 6 | Screen and controls | done |
| 7 | MIDI out per part, resonator | done |
| 8 | On the FM-1: firmware, web installer, boot logo | done |
| 9 | After 1.0: measure CPU on the FM-1, then fine-tune every composer from their music | next |
Building and testing
Clone with Felucca's engines (a submodule, MIT): git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/delirioux/tuna.git,
or git submodule update --init in a clone made without it. Then, on Linux or macOS with a C compiler:
sh tests/tuna_tests.sh # all of Tuna's tests: theory, generator, sequencer, presets, screen, 89 composers and styles
sh tests/tuna_ui_test.sh # the screen alone: every page as PNG, two GIFs of HOME playing (build/tuna_ui)
sh tests/tuna_felucca.sh out 60 # render every composer through Felucca's engines to WAV
Tuna in the browser, the whole firmware on a simulated FM-1 (needs emcc, or clang with a WASI sysroot in
WASI_SYSROOT; run ./build.sh once first for build/gen):
sh web/emu/tuna_build.sh # build/tuna_emu: serve it and open index.html
node web/emu/tuna_emu_test.mjs build/tuna_emu/tuna.wasm # boot, play, browse, root, pages, stop, save
For the FM-1 itself: FELUCCA_TUNA=1 ./build.sh, with Felucca's toolchain and SDK as BUILDING.md
describes. Every push to main builds the package and the site on GitHub Actions
(.github/workflows/firmware.yml); a new version there is tagged and released
(notes in docs/RELEASE.md).
Documentation
- docs/SPEC.md: the specification and all 89 composers and styles, era by era
- docs/DEVELOPMENT.md: the working notes: agreements, workflow, design decisions, risks and what comes next
Credits and licence
Tuna is a modified version of Felucca by Leo Kuroshita (@kurogedelic), Hügelton Instruments
(https://github.com/hugelton/Felucca); Felucca's own README is kept in
docs/FELUCCA.md. The Tuna files are firmware/src/tuna_* and tests/tuna_*.
Tuna's random section is a port of Marbles by Emilie Gillet (https://github.com/pichenettes/eurorack), MIT (LICENSES/MIT-Marbles.txt).
Tuna is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 only (LICENSE). Bundled and ported parts keep their own licences: see LICENSING.md.