Orpheus Meet Orpheus from Orphic-FM!

Orpheus (from Ancient Greek: Ὀρφεύς) was a divine musician from Greek Mythology who used his music to charm Hades and Persephone so he could rescue his wife, Eurydice from the Underworld. He was a master of the Lyre.

FM stands for Frequency Modulation which describes a technique to enhance sound by creating rich harmonics involving changing the pitch of waveforms produced by Oscillators.

Orphic-FM is a software app inspired by the LYRA-8 organismic synthesizer invented by SOMA LABORATORY. This app’s official purpose is to provide a platform for musical creativity enhanced by AI integration. In reality, I’m just looking for some interesting sounds and visuals to help me relax and meditate.

The AI integration features a persona named Orpheus who has full access to all the sound features in the app. The agent operates by streaming prompts and tool commands in an effort to shape the soundscape in real-time. The AI integration contains:

  • Drone Mode – AI creates evolving background drones used to accompany the user sonic creations
  • Solo Mode – Sit back and watch the AI generate a complete composition based on predefined prompts that represent parts of a song
  • Tidal Mode – Uses the TidalCycles programming language to create interactive music the user can “watch” and “change” in real-time
  • Chat Mode – User can issue prompts to create and influence sounds

Quick Demos

Getting compelling sounds out of the instrument is an art which I intend to explore in a series of posts about soundscaping, feature demonstrations, and technical underpinnings of the app.

Features I intend to cover include

Feature Description Visuals
Separation of Concerns
Single Responsibility Principle		 Architecture to support many dynamic features Architecture Diagram
Adaptive UX App supports different UX for Desktop and Mobile formfactors PortraitLandscape
Frequency Modulation, LFOs, Delays Sound scaping tools FM LFO Delays
TidalCycles and REPL Mini-Notation for defining and playing music in code
AI Agent App integration Using Prompts and Tools for Sound Control
Midi integration MIDI devices for external control with interactive learning mode MIDI Integration
TBD