A generator of Berlin School music: long pieces, whole concerts and night sets, composed and played by the program itself -- sequencer rows of different lengths turning against each other over a common root, a bass that holds the ground, tape choirs and string machines, a lead that sings over the peak, the hands of a player on the filters, and the room of a tape echo and a long hall. Everything is synthesised; nothing is played back from a recording.
VST3 plugin and standalone application (on macOS also an Audio Unit, on Linux an LV2) for Windows (x64), macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux (x86-64), and a native app for Meta Quest. Licence: AGPL-3.0.
Ephemeris-1.2.0-Setup.exe
installs the standalone, the VST3, the offline renderer and the manual. Nothing else has to be installed: the runtime
is linked in. There is a
portable zip
for anyone who would rather not run an installer, the
Quest app
(installed with adb install -r, developer mode), and the
manual -- every
page of the panel as a picture, what each control does, and why it is built the way it is.
macOS zip for Apple Silicon (macOS 12 or newer): the standalone, the VST3 and the Audio Unit, built on GitHub's runners and attached to the release within the hour after it; signed ad hoc, not notarized (README-macOS.txt inside says how to open it), and not yet tried on a real Mac.
Linux archive for x86-64 (glibc 2.35 or newer: Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 and later): the standalone, the VST3, the LV2 and the renderer, built and tested on GitHub's Ubuntu runners and tried under WSL; README-Linux.txt inside says where everything goes.
Requirements: Windows 10 or 11, a 64-bit processor with AVX2 (every x86-64 since 2013), and a VST3 host if you want the plugin; Meta Quest 2 or later for the app. The installer is not code-signed: Windows' SmartScreen may warn once.
A track per style, rendered by eph_render and nothing else: Cosmic, Doom, Melodic, Modern, Drift (MP3). The video is the Cosmic demo with pictures by
KaleidoscopeEnhanced, its cuts placed by the
track's own score cues (the bars, the sections, the drops). Tools/demo/make_demos.py renders them all again; they live on the release
demos.
- Pieces, concerts, night sets. Five styles -- Cosmic, Doom, Melodic, Modern, Drift -- and one of your own, each a profile of tempo, form, layers, darkness and loudness. A piece is a seed: the same seed gives the same piece, sample for sample. Concerts morph from one style to another along an arc of tension; night sets overlap their pieces as a DJ mixes two tracks.
- Form and harmony after the modern Berlin School. Atmosphere, entry, builds that end where the rows meet again, the lead's section, the peak, breaks, bridges and the coda; a chord track the bass follows under the unchanged sequence, sequencer transpositions, parallel changes of mode, eight modes.
- The rack. Eight rows of different lengths and steps and a transposer row; sequence archetypes, probability gates, ratchets, a doubled pulse, a pattern that loses its steps in the breakdown; two modulation lanes per row that move the timbre against the notes.
- The moves. A player's two hands, never more: the filters opening towards the peak and closing in the coda, the echo thrown now and then, the wind rising and falling -- as offsets on the knobs you set.
- The sounds and the mix. 1024 factory presets per synth, most of them with modulation; the composer chooses them for every piece and sets them, with the piece's mix, on the knobs themselves -- the pages show what plays, and a knob you turn moves from there.
- Every piece as loud as its style means: its loudest part measured and brought to its style's level -- while the piece already plays, the correction gliding in.
- Reroll any part on its own -- form, tempo, rows, rack, layers, lead, pads, moves, sounds -- save a piece as a small set file, export WAV (with stems) and MIDI.
- Ten modular voices -- the eight rows, the lead and the drone -- running side by side in the SIMD lanes of the processor at twice the sample rate: two oscillators after one of six designs (the voices' own, Moog 921, Prophet-5, Oberheim SEM, ARP 2600, E-mu Modular) with hard sync and cross modulation, band-limited by BLEP and BLAMP; or a wavetable; a driven mixer; one of ten filters solved as their circuits -- the Moog ladder, the Prophet's and the Juno's cascades, the Oberheim SEM, the Xpander's pole mixing, the diode ladder, the Korg35, the Polivoks, the EDP Wasp, a comb -- by Newton-Raphson every sample.
- Modulation on every synth: full ADSRs for amplitude and filter, a mod envelope, four LFOs (synced to the bar or free, retriggered, fading in) and an eight-slot matrix.
- A polyphonic wavetable pad synth (51 tables: formulas, the PPG's, the classic VCOs' waves, sampled single cycles), a tape keyboard (choir, strings, flute -- and the machine: wow, flutter, sag, the tape's end), a string machine after the Streichfett, drums for the styles that have them, and an atmosphere of wind, sweeps, bleeps and grains.
Tape echo or a bucket-brigade delay, springs, a second echo for the counter rows, early reflections, a blend room that feeds an eight-line FDN hall (or a plate), a shimmer hall. A mix after a production guide for depth and clarity: a distance per source (level, highs and hall together), cascaded ducking in six bands, a resonance tamer, the bass mono under 100 Hz, a guarded width, a gentle compressor, a soft clipper and a true-peak limiter at -1 dBTP.
 |
 |
| A row's voice: VCO, filter, envelopes, LFOs, matrix | The mixer: a strip per source, the composer's mix on the faders |
 |
 |
| The pad synth | The rerolls and the moves over the whole piece |
The panel is the family's (Phosphene, Totality, Parhelion and, in part, Noctuary): the same header, the same order of the tabs, the same keys (Space, Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y, F1, F11), the same controllers (74 the filters, 11 the echo throw, 64 Hold Moves) and the same hands on a Meta Quest -- whose controls show only while a headset sends them.
The plan, the musical specification and the literature behind each building block are in docs/PLAN.md (German); the manual is built out of the program itself (docs/manual).
In a DAW Ephemeris sends what it plays as MIDI -- every part on a channel of its own, as in the MIDI export -- and has a stereo output per stem besides the main one, off until the host switches them on, so a part can be recorded as notes or mixed on a channel of its own. The standalone joins an Ableton Link session (Settings > Ableton Link): the session's tempo, its bars, its start and stop. A MIDI keyboard can be split between two voices, locked to the scale and given a velocity curve (the Keyboard group). The manual has the details (With a DAW and other apps).
The family jam (Settings > Family jam): the five instruments play as one band on the local network. One leads, the others follow -- its key (the root at their next bar line, the mode with their next piece), the energy of its sections, its breaks and drops --, on the bars Ableton Link or the DAW gives them all. KaleidoscopeEnhanced cuts its pictures to the score cues of all five.
The same in every instrument of the family (build.ps1, CMakePresets.json, cmake/Family.cmake):
.\build.ps1 # Visual Studio's compiler, Release: build\msvc (the solution), the programs in bin\msvc
.\build.ps1 icx # Intel's oneAPI compiler: build\icx, the programs in bin\icx
.\build.ps1 msvc -Test # and the tests (ctest)
.\build.ps1 icx -Run # and start the standalone
.\build.ps1 quest # the Meta Quest app: bin\quest\EphemerisQuest.apk| Folder | What is in it |
|---|---|
bin\msvc, bin\icx |
what can be started: the standalone, the VST3, the renderer (and the files they read) |
build\<preset> |
the build trees -- build\msvc\Ephemeris.slnx for Visual Studio |
dist\ |
the release: setup, portable zip, checksums (Deploy\build_release.ps1, from build\release) |
work\ |
local data, renders and logs, never in git |
Without the script: cmake --preset msvc, cmake --build --preset msvc, ctest --preset msvc; the icx presets need
Visual Studio's and oneAPI's environment, which build.ps1 sets up.
EPH_MUTE=1 starts the standalone or the plugin muted (the screenshot mode EPH_SHOT does as well); every
automated run uses it.
bin/msvc/eph_render.exe --minutes 14 --seed 11 --set "compose.style=Cosmic" --out work/renders/piece.wav --midi work/renders/piece.mid
bin/msvc/eph_render.exe --concert 60 --seed 3 --set "compose.style=Drift" --out work/renders/night.wav
bin/msvc/eph_render.exe --set-file work/renders/piece.ephset --reroll lead --save-set work/renders/piece2.ephset
bin/msvc/eph_render.exe --listTools/manual/make_manual.py |
the manual out of the program: prose (chapters.txt), parameter tables (eph_render --dump-params), screenshots |
Tools/analyze_ref.py |
statistics of reference recordings (tempogram, row lengths, filter sweeps, levels); the audio never enters the project |
Deploy/build_release.ps1 |
release build (Intel's icx where oneAPI is installed, else MSVC): static runtime, tests, pluginval, manual, stage, checks, optional signing, portable zip, Inno Setup installer |
Deploy/publish_release.ps1 |
the GitHub release: tag, installer, portable zip, Quest APK, release notes |
eph_bench (Tests/bench.cpp) |
the voice bank's and the pad synth's cost per second of audio |
Quest/build_apk.ps1 |
the Quest APK without Gradle (see Quest/README.md) |
Once a day the program asks GitHub's releases whether a newer version is out and shows it in the status row as a link to its page; nothing else is sent, nothing is downloaded. "Update check" in the status row turns it off.
Ephemeris is one of five instruments that share their build, their panel and the hands of a Meta Quest: Noctuary (ambient), Phosphene (psytrance), Ephemeris (Berlin School), Totality (techno) and Parhelion (trance). All five, with their demos, on one page: reneweller-coding.github.io/VRAudio.
AGPL-3.0, as Noctuary and Phosphene. Some modules are copied from Phosphene and name their origin and commit in their file header.