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The Evolve Panel

When creating the Evolve panel, we decided to go with a design philosophy of elegance over one of clutter. To avoid clutter and retain clarity of function, every button has ToolTip text - holding your mouse over any button reveals a short description of its function.

Beats

Clicking on any of the Beat buttons plays that beat and makes it the active beat. If you then click the Evolve button it is that beat - the active beat - which is evolved.

Play All Beats

The large beat button in the center of the wheel, when clicked, plays all of the beats from left to right. The number of times which each individual beat is repeated before the next beat is played is governed by the Settings panel.

Save

Saving creates a new folder in the saved folder that has three codes The first is the year and day day (year and a value from 1 to 365). This code allows for you to quickly see which beats were most recent. The second is the session number (how many times the New Generation button has been used up to that point). This code allows you to distinguish the order in which beats were created. The final code is a unique string representing that particular family of beats.

What is saved: A MIDI file of your beat and beat file with a ".musg" extension.

Evolve

Uses the last played beat as the parent beat. It eliminates the other four beats and replaces them with children of the parent beat. Children are variations on the parent. The degree of the variation depends on the mutation rate, which can be adjusted in the settings panel.

New Generation

Creates a brand new batch of beats, sets the generation number to "1" and turns off all triangles indicating the parent beat. Each beat is unique and unrelated to any other beat. Use this button when this when you want to start from scratch. Such a situation could arise when you have evolved a beat as far as you want to and start in a brand new direction, or possibly when the program first starts the generated beats are not up to your standards and you want some more options.

Triangles

The triangles indicate wich beat is the parent beat. Beats which are the parent beat have an orange triangle next to them.

Balls

Balls indicate which channels are active. If a ball is orange, then it is active. All active channels may be played individually by clicking on their respective orange ball.