uSEQ

Live Coding CV & Gate Generator and Processor

Manufacturer: Emute Lab Instruments

uSEQ is a Live Coding CV & Gate Generator and Processor.

It's the result of cutting-edge research on Live Coding instruments, coming out of the Experimental Music Technologies (EMUTE) Lab at the University of Sussex in the UK, where it is being used as an experimental platform for designing and prototyping explicitly-computational instruments that are fully hybrid: analog & digital, hardware & software.

It is fully open source and DIY-friendly, both in hardware & software, and the source files are freely available and extensible here:
https://github.com/Emute-Lab-Instruments/uSEQ

IO:
- 2x CV Ins
- 2x Gate Ins
- 3x CV Outs
- 3x Gate Outs

Hardware controls:
- 2x general-purpose rotary encoders (acting as attenuverters for the CV ins, if plugged in)
- 1x momentary push-button
- 1x 3-way toggle switch

Live Coding is a creative practice that has been around since at least the mid 1980s, whereby music and/or visuals are improvised by writing and interactively modifying computer code in real time, often on stage in front of a live audience, all the while the very program being modified is constantly running and generating signals. Modular synthesis is itself, in many ways, a form of hybrid live coding: both analog and digital modules, acting much like functions in programming languages, having their parameters changed and modulated in different ways over time and even rearranged in the signal chain to form new computations all the while the music keeps playing.

uSEQ brings live coding inside Eurorack, enabling the use of real-time generative coding to control any other modules without the need for a DC-coupled interface, or any other gear besides the module itself and something to write the code on and send it to the module. There is currently an open-source, browser-based code editor available, created specifically for uSEQ and under active development, and editors for other interfaces such touch screens will follow. Any existing Eurorack controller or CV can be used with the inputs to control any number of parameters in the code.

uSEQ receives its code through a regular USB C cable. All code runs on the on-board microcontroller chip, meaning that it can keep running even after the USB cable has been unplugged, or even resume running straight after a full power cycle. The code tells the module what CV and gate signals to generate from each of the outputs, each of which can be simple, complex, repetitive, or random. Any of the input signals can be used when generating the outputs, hence it can also be used as a CV processor.

The programming language used to interact with uSEQ is a called ModuLisp—a contraction of 'Modular'/'Modulation' and 'Lisp', the iconic and hugely-influential family of programming languages dating all the way back to the early 1960s. While ModuLisp borrows a lot of inspiration from the Lisp languages of yesteryear, it has been designed and streamlined specifically for audio and music, with various built-in conveniences and many different ways of organizing time and time-varying signals, for both rhythmic and free-form sequencing and modulation alike.

Both the available IO and hardware controls can be extended by chaining multiple modules, or the dedicated expansion boards (to be released soon).

https://www.emutelabinstruments.co.uk/useq/