Bezier Curve MIDI tool (a music hackathon thing)

MIDI transform

Ableton live 12 came with a bunch of amazing features and one of them was MIDI transform tools. This one. I found some curve based transforms in those pretty cool so I decided to do this as a fun project for the Music Hack Day India which was a part of ADC2025.

What ended up happening?

Ethan, Azan and I were brainstorming for a while to come up with something like this Max4Live device I’d made a while back (something which makes midi out of bezier curves) - Max4live scurvee. We eventually decided to make it a web based tool as our goal for this hackathon submission was to make the creative process of making music accessible to anyone. After a bunch of tinkering we came up with this which we ended up demoing. PIC of the thing

We had a few prototypes and things evolved a lot (all code be lurking in this repo) I was pretty satisfied with this design as it was a huge upgrade from the max4live device, given that there were more scale options and I could customise the UI as much as I wanted. The only limitation was that it was a pain to get realtime playback and updation in a web based environment and that’s where I knew I’m limited by the immense programming wall that I needed to cross to get to DAW architecture level on the web lol. So we stuck to generating midi and importing it in to a DAW/midi player. I wish I could show you how these curves sounded but I guess you could try it out yourself once I finish making a better version of this and host it (I hope work gets less hectic :( and I could do more fun stuff)).

Examples

Look at this curve curve raw this is the curve before I generated it’s midi.

curve midi

It’s funny how the midi looks flipped. Maybe the way the curve is rendered on the browser is inverted. I’m really gonna have to debug what that is cause I didn’t get time to cross-check given that we were almost late to submit haha. Also, he midi sounds really interesting given I chose this scale haha

scale options

The outcome?

We ended up getting a special mention ;) and although this was all we could do within less than 7 hours, I am convinced that this could become a really fun tool for musicians to play around with. I’m gonna make more M4L midi devices like this. Shoutout to my teammates who helped get this across. Ethan’s socials (he works at this music tech company called pitchinnovations btw) and Azan is one of the founding members of Cryptlex. Amazing people fo sho.