'Cyclone' - Work in Progress (Patreon)

Here is a short video giving you a little glimpse into this week's V2 development.

Cyclone will be the penultimate system to be added into V2, taking us to a total of 64 distinct musical constellations. As we work on these final few, we are taking the time to explore under-utilised features or unexplored possibilities, to help us plan for the future.

As the video explains, Cyclone is using the actual physics of the Wreckage Systems environment and it is the actual collisions between the objects on screen that trigger the notes.

As this GIF shows, we originally had wilder plans for messing with physics. The idea of untethered, rogue forms like this wandering through the log remains appealing, but we couldn't find a way of making it reliably sound good.

Further experiments led us to (for now at least), toning down the physics and movement, and assembling a new combination of various older ideas, combining phasing, deliberately unreliable timing, Euclidean rhythms and everybody's favourite: sad piano notes.

There's a fair amount of work still needed to properly push this idea to a place we are happy with. Some attention also needs to be paid to the visuals, which will have interesting repercussions. In the case of all the other systems, the visual log is only a representation of the actual audio systems, which are essentially invisible. The difference with Cyclone is that the visuals are the system, and it is the movement and interaction of these sprites that is generating the audio. Therefore changing the shapes, sizes, speed and mass of the various sprites will in turn change the way the musical patterns manifest. Much to explore.