X-Ponder

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What if you could jam with your DAW and get instant musical feedback, or trade phrases with any synth — in real-time?

A uniquely responsive MIDI device, X-Ponder is our generative performance transformer designed by Ableton Certified Trainer Noah Pred to easily produce compelling musical call-and-response. While it doesn't use conventional machine learning, it's useful to think of it like a musical AI chat bot: feed it a “prompt” in the form of MIDI notes and chords, and it replies in kind with a response based on the pitches, chords, velocities, and note lengths played into it.

Manual mode works something like a loop pedal with a mind of its own: punch in for it to listen, then punch out for it to riff back indefinitely based on what you played into it. Fixed mode sets an interval in bars for it to automatically toggle from listening to playback for improvisational call-and-response phrase trading. Listen mode simply waits for a user-defined period of silence before the device responds — and as soon as you begin playing, it automatically listens again, like the musical conversation partner you never had (but probably wish you did). With default Short memory, X-Ponder’s data bank is wiped whenever it starts listening; switch to Long memory to continue adding MIDI data to X-Ponder’s stored history, expanding the vocabulary of notes and chords it can draw from. Finally, Import mode allows you to instantly remix one (or more) MIDI files by loading them in as the MIDI source.

A variety of output controls are available to tweak X-Ponder’s expression to give it a personality of its own. It can be transposed to any register and easily used to trigger a different instrument than the one played into it. Naturally, all pitch output is constrained within the scale and key set locally, by Live 12's scale and key, or via the bundled Global Hub utility. An optional Viewer helps illustrate the received note input and generated output, and of course the device is fully Info View annotated and optimized for Push.