Dr. Zoppa has released AMI-Polychaos, a generative MIDI plugin for macOS, available as an Audio Unit MIDI effect (Logic Pro) and as a VST3 instrument (Ableton Live and other VST3 hosts).
AMI-Polychaos turns a held note into four voices of counterpoint. Hold a chord with the DAW transport running and the plugin plays for as long as the chord is held; release it and the music stops. It is not four generators running side by side: one chaotic trajectory is read by four heads, each lagging behind the last, so the four voices are the same orbit seen at four moments. That is what keeps the result related as counterpoint rather than four independent random lines.
Controls:
- SPREAD sets how far the voices lag behind each other (zero is homophony; opening it turns them into independent lines).
- STAGGER rotates each voice’s euclidean rhythm, separating the voices in time.
- HARMONY chooses between chromatic transposition of the held chord (CHORD) and a single shared scale (TONAL).
- Six chaotic maps, each with its own character, plus a velocity cycle and a euclidean rhythm per voice.
The plugin generates MIDI, not audio, and is routed into any instrument. It comes out of doctoral research in algorithmic composition at UNAM (the AMI system, 2022) and is built with Max/RNBO and JUCE. It opens the AMI-CMMAS series; its two siblings, AMI-PLSYSTEMS (an L-system played as a mensuration canon) and AMI-POLYMARKOV (a Markov engine that learns from a MIDI file), are available on the same page.
Pricing & Availability
AMI-Polychaos is $29 (introductory price until October 30, 2026; $39 after). A fully functional free 30-day trial is available. macOS 10.13 or later, universal binary (Intel and Apple Silicon), AU and VST3; installers are signed and notarized. A Windows VST3 build is in testing.
Video (60-second demo, the plugin is the only sound): YouTube/nlP0RHTlbd4
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