James Mason

Setting out the desk…

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Section 03 / 06

Instruments & software

The desk

Personal · 2026 · working prototypes

Seed part generators

Chipseed: a dark piano-roll monitor with orange notes and a dotted contour line, eight segmented macro faders, system selectors, gene locks, and lists of recent and kept seeds.
Chipseed: a two-bar melody in the monitor, with the macro faders and gene locks below.Screenshot of my prototype
Drumseed showing a generated song: a waveform above a song map of eight sections, with block heights for planned intensity, outlined blocks for returns to earlier material and a playhead.
Drumseed: the song map of a generated 2:22 drum song, showing its sections, returns, silences and density.Screenshot of my prototype
Voiceseed: seven character sliders from nonsense–language down to close–distant, the waveform of a 5.9-second vocal sound, eight labelled fragments and a session library.
Voiceseed: the seven controls, a generated vocal sound and the eight pieces cut from it.Screenshot of my prototype

Drumseed, Voiceseed and Chipseed are desktop instruments for writing music. Each one generates a strange but usable part — a whole drum song, a vocal fragment or a chip-style melody — and gives you controls that steer what the generator decides, instead of editing notes.

My role

I designed the concepts, parameters, musical rules and tests; the software was written with AI coding tools.

  • The original concepts, parameters and their vocabulary
  • Musical rules, test criteria and listening evaluation

Drumseed

Writes one complete drum song. A live-drum reference shapes the structure and an electronic reference shapes the behaviour. The song map shows each section's planned intensity, its real density and where it returns to earlier material. It exports MIDI, an Ableton Drum Rack with the sound design built in, and an audio preview.

Voiceseed

Makes vocal sounds two to eight seconds long. Seven controls run from nonsense to language, machine to human and clean to wrecked; each is left to the generator or pinned by hand. Mutate grows relatives of a sound you like, and each sound can be cut into up to eight labelled pieces, ready for a drum rack.

Chipseed

Grows short chip-style melodies. Eight macro faders end in a red zone where the music is allowed to break down, and gene locks keep the pitch, rhythm, shape, voice or timing through each mutation. It exports WAV and MIDI.

Outcome

Three working desktop prototypes, September 2026; not released.

Credits

  • Software written with AI coding tools, directed by my rules and checked by listening and automated tests

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