Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Soniverse?
The Soniverse is a software environment for creating music.
I have been creating loop-based music for a long time. At some point, I wondered what might happen if we abandoned the traditional left-to-right, linear paradigm of sequencing notes in favor of one centered around the shape which most directly reflects the idea of a "loop" - the circle.
After experimenting with this idea, the result is the Soniverse. When using the Soniverse, the composer controls the celestial motions of planets in order to trigger musical events. Everything that happens musically happens circularly.
How do I use the Soniverse?
Check out the Tutorial.
Is the Soniverse useful?
It depends.
If you try to use the Soniverse to do everything you already know how to do with your favorite music production environment, then you will want to hurt me for creating it. If, instead, you play around with the Soniverse to see what you come up with, then you might find it pretty useful.
In lots of ways, the Soniverse is far less useful than "normal" music production software. For example, one of the benefits that comes with the linear paradigm of making music is the ability to view the timing of any musical event in relation to other musical events. That is, if two events happen at the same time, they are horizontally aligned, and it's easy to see that by simply looking at the two events. In the Soniverse, for better or worse, it is much harder to detect this kind of alignment visually. This example is just one of many pitfalls which result from using circles to represent loops.
In other ways, the Soniverse is more useful than traditional music software. Try creating a drum loop which makes heavy use of polyrhythms - you'll find the Soniverse quite useful and fun to play with.
The more you play around inside the Soniverse, the better sense you will get of its strengths and weaknesses.