Ok @cycle1, time for Function of the Week #2! Ok a bit over time sorry..
It's the curious "Snowball" function. I thought @kindohm had a look at this in a recent live stream but I can't find it archived.. Snowball has a cousin called soak - I'll might cover that later this week.
-- snowball takes a pattern, applies the function to it (the third argument),
-- then applies it again to the result, and again to the result of that, and
-- so on, the number of times given in the first argument. Then it
-- combines all the results together pairwise, with the function given in
-- the second argument.
-- Lets start with a simple tom pattern:
d1 $ s "lt mt ht ~"
-- Then apply 'hurry 2' to it each time, to a depth of 4 'recursions'
d1 $ snowball 4 (overlay) (hurry 2) $ s "lt mt ht ~"
-- You can hear the 'hurried' layers built up. The first time you hear the
-- original pattern, then that pattern combined with itself (so it sounds
-- louder), then you start hearing the 'hurried' layers added over the third
-- and fourth cycle.
-- This doesn't work too well really - I don't think it should be combined
-- with itself that second time. Here's an alternate version that doesn't
-- do that:
snowball' :: Int -> (Pattern a -> Pattern a -> Pattern a) -> (Pattern a -> Pattern a) -> Pattern a -> Pattern a
snowball' depth combinationFunction f pattern = cat $ take depth $
scanl combinationFunction pattern $ drop 1 $ iterate f pattern
d1 $ snowball' 4 (overlay) (hurry 2) $ s "lt mt ht ~"
-- Instead of 'overlay' to play the layers on top of each other, we
-- can use a function to combine them. For example using '+' on a
-- snowballed number pattern, to add the layers together:
d1 $ n (scale "major" $ snowball 4 (+) (slow 1.5) "0 1 2 3")
# s "supermandolin"
# legato 3
d1 $ n (snowball 4 (+) (slow 1.5) "0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7")
# s "cpu"
# speed 2
d1 $ (note $ scale "hexPhrygian" $ "0 . 2 3 ~ . 0 1 . -1 -2") #s "gtr"
d1 $ (note $ scale "hexPhrygian" $
snowball 4 (+) (slow 2) "0 . 2 3 ~ . 0 1 . -1 -2") #s "gtr"
(or perhaps an "undocumented feature") I originally wanted to make melodies like in the second example that