Meta-sequencing: Controlling sequence voices and Polyphony using the Polymap, Sieve, valve and Maskxor Objects in Pure Data

I describe a system of polyphony for Pure Data (Puckette, 1996) that is applicable to situations where multiple sequencers are routed to multiple voices, so that the degree of polyphony may be controlled for each sequencer, and polyphonic voices are assigned automatically. Three new objects are crucial for this purpose: maskxor, a bitmask object, sieve, an arraybased router, polymap, a polyphony-controlled matrix map and valve, a source identifier object. These objects are configured to dynamically adjust the allocation of sequencer events and playback voices so that for example in the Speechcutter-poly application developed in association with the Centre for Creative Research in Sound Art Practise at the London College of Communication, eight sequencers independent of one other are routed to 32 shared voices, and relationships and linkages between the sequencers may be altered onthe-fly.