Acid Hit

A collaboration between generative music composer Canton Becker and algorithmic visual artist Jeffrey Ventrella.

"Acid Hit" is a love letter to the venerable Roland TB-303 Bass Line synthesizer. Although the device was initially a commercial flop, its squelchy robotic sound was repurposed in the late 80's to give birth to acid house, a genre of electronic music that energized rave culture in the UK.

Becker used the Tone.js web audio framework to generate these 30 second long compositions in Javascript. Some sounds are synthesized on the fly, while others are arranged by slicing, dicing, and pitch shifting audio samples.

Ventrella designed the visual effects using vanilla Javascript. The animations are based on the Archimedean number spiral - a mathematical object that he trained to dance in the space of polar coordinates, like a mechanical whirling Dervish. Ventrella's animation responds to a continual stream of musical events, revealing emergent patterns.

Type [c] for audio controls or to export audio 'stems' suitable for remixing.