Experimental Music Software.
ixi is a small international collective of musicians that work mainly with improvisation and live music. The aim with ixi software is to explore abstract screen based interfaces as controllers for synth engines written in open source programming languages such as Pure Data or SuperCollider.
ixi software is an open source experimental project concerned with building musical instruments where the interface is at the same time a meta-composition. The instrument becomes a pattern generator suitable for the performance of generative music. ixi runs a label as well where music is released under the Creative Commons license.
One of the aims of ixi software is to resist the constraints of commercial music software. From the ixi website: "We are interested in free and open music software in all senses. Free as in "free beer", free as in "free speech" and free as in "free jazz". The last "freedom" being the most important one. We acknowledge the constraints that software puts on the musician, the limits that the tool sets for the creative process and we therefore promote and try to disseminate technologies which open up the limits of the software (or defines new boundaries). Our belief is that it should be the artist that defines the scope of his or her instrument (and therefore music), not a commercial software company."
The latest software release is called ixiQuarks which is built on top of SuperCollider, allowing for much of the expressive computational power of that environment. The user is faced with the simplicity of ixi software with seamless access to SuperCollider both within the ixiQuarks and at the side.
The software can be found and downloaded for free on the ixi website.