🤔 What is Mercury?
All elements of the language are designed around making code more accessible and less obfuscating for both the programmer-performer and the audience alike. This motivation stretches down to the coding-style itself which uses clear descriptive names for functions and a simple clear syntax. Mercury provides the performer with an extensive library of algorithms to generate or transform sequences that can modulate musical parameters, such as (but not limited to) melody and rhythm, over time. The environment focuses on creating sound in the first place, but is not limited to that and can for example also output MIDI, OSC to control other processes such as visuals.
The language is named after te planet Mercury. In astrology Mercury rules the creation and expression of our mental processes. The planet implores us to express ourselves. Mercury is about a quick wit, quick thinking. It lets us move from one thing to the next.
Mercury was first programmed by Timo Hoogland in 2018 with the Cycling'74 Max8 node-based creative coding environment, as an abstracted layer on the Max/MSP audio engine and with the use of Node4Max for parsing, lexing and generative algorithms and Jitter/OpenGL for the visuals and the responsive texteditor. Later Mercury was also ported to a browser based version using WebAudio and the ToneJS framework. The original version was designed around a limitation of writing no more than 30 lines of code. This limitation is still present in the Mercury4Max version, but is not in use when using the browser or external editor.
Mercury finds its roots in the concept of Serialism, a musical composition style where all parameters such as pitch, rhythm and dynamics are expressed in a series of values that adjust the instruments state over time. This series in Mercury is refered to as a list.
Every instance of an instrument has an internal counter. This counter increments (0, 1, 2, 3,... etc) when an instrument triggers an event based on the time-interval from time(). This is also called a step-sequencer. When a list is added as argument to an instrument-function the instrument uses its count as a lookup-position (index) taking the corresponding value from the list. As soon as the index is higher then the amount of values in the list it will return to the beginning and start over, therefore the list is circular/looping.
Mercury makes use of the total-serialism NodeJS Package to generate and transform numbersequences that are used for melodies, rhythms, parameters and basically anything that can be sequenced in the environment. total-serialism is a set of functions used for procedurally generating and transforming lists. This library is mainly designed with algorithmic composition of music in mind, but can be useful for other purposes that involve generating and manipulating lists and numbers.