A generator of hypnotic Berlin techno: tracks of 32-bar plateaus and whole DJ sets, composed from a seed and synthesised while they play -- a kick that hands its phase to the rumble under it, a twelve-lane kit, the ping, a bass and a 303 through circuit-modelled filters, the dub chord in its echoes and springs, and a DJ who mixes the tracks into one long recomposition. 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), a command-line renderer, and a native app for Meta Quest. Licence: AGPL-3.0.
Totality-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; not yet run on a headset), and the
manual -- every
page of the panel as a picture and what each control does.
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 tot_render and nothing else: Hypnotic, Ostgut, Dub, Raw Peak (MP3). The video is the Ostgut 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.
- Tracks in three forms -- the Arc (the DJ tool: intro, a body that builds its full groove, outro), the Peak (a long kick-out and the densest block after it), the Endless (full from the first bar, changing by exchange) -- from four style profiles, Hypnotic, Ostgut, Dub and Raw Peak, which morph into each other, or a style of your own. A track is a seed: the same seed gives the same track, sample for sample.
- One operation per 32-bar block, events on the 8-bar lines, automation by two hands; eight candidates per block, the one chosen that keeps the bar similarity inside a corridor fitted to thirty reference tracks.
- A figure and waves. Every track has a voice it is remembered by -- a ping motif, a dub stab, a bass riff or a 303 line --, and its body runs in waves of 32 or 64 bars that build towards a landing, drop something away just before it and breathe in between.
- Kinds. Every track is a Tool, Roller, Stab, Acid, Bleep, Dub Chord or Tribal, drawn by its style; a set never plays two of a kind in a row. The thumbs rate what plays, and with Favor Ratings the liked kinds and sounds come more often.
- Reroll any part on its own -- form, harmony, rack, layers, blocks, events, hands, sounds, figure -- and keep
the result as a small
.totsetfile.
- One long recomposition, up to twelve hours: seven dramaturgies of tempo and energy, tracks in neighbouring Camelot keys, the tempo drifting by at most 1 BPM a track, about twenty tracks an hour.
- Blends as a Berlin DJ mixes: the highs first, the mids over the last 16 bars, the bass swapped hard on a 32-bar line through the isolator where the incoming track's figure lands; a third deck that borrows (the last track's hats carried on, the next one's figure teased in, a loop of the one before layered under); the DJ's hand on the EQs, filter and echo between the blends.
- The low end as one system: a kick of three engines (Sweep, Resonator, 909) with a 909 top layer; the rumble, which continues the kick's phase under its hall; a sub bass whose notes start in the kick's phase.
- A twelve-lane kit with the 909's metal oscillators, noise, modal, tone and FM voices; the ping, FM through a low-pass gate; a bass synth and a 303 line through ten filters solved as their circuits (Moog ladder, Prophet, Juno, Oberheim SEM, Xpander, diode ladder, Korg35, Polivoks, EDP Wasp, comb); the dub chord with its tape echo, springs and plate; drone, texture and a granular cloud.
- 1024 factory presets per synth in sixteen groups; the composer chooses one per synth and per kit lane for every track, by its style, and the knobs show them while the track plays.
- The mix: multiband ducking triggered by the kick's events, a track bus with tilt and parallel glue, a DJ mixer with isolators, a master with a clipper at four times the rate and a true-peak limiter, and a leveler that sets every part against the kick and brings every track's loudest part to its style's loudness -- balance, width and loudness fitted to 30 measured reference recordings (only their statistics are kept).
- In a DAW Totality follows the host's transport and tempo. The Perform page is a mixer: seven mutes, a master filter, an echo throw, isolator kills and faders per deck, every control learnable from MIDI.
- Play it yourself: a MIDI keyboard plays a voice -- the kit, the bass, the 303, the ping, the chord, the drone, or each on its channel -- with the sound its page has; Replace leaves that voice's generated notes out, Layer plays over them, and with the composer off only what you play sounds, through the mix as composed.
- Out: a 24-bit WAV with cue markers, the cues as JSON and as a rekordbox collection, MIDI with the tempo map, stems that sum exactly to the mix, seamless 4- and 8-bar DJ loops, and OSC cues for a visualiser while it plays.
 |
 |
| The track: its blocks, the rerolls and the automation | A 40-minute DJ mix, track by track |
 |
 |
| The 303: oscillator, a circuit filter, envelopes, sends | The mixer: a strip per voice, the composer's mix on the faders |
The panel is the family's -- Phosphene (psytrance), Ephemeris (Berlin School), Parhelion (trance) and, in part, Noctuary (ambient): the same header, the same order of the tabs, the same keys (Space, Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y, F1, F11), the same controllers (74 the master filter, 11 the echo throw) and the same hands on a Meta Quest -- whose controls show only while a headset sends them.
The plan, in German, with the state of every phase: docs/PLAN.md. The research it rests on: docs/research. The manual is built out of the program itself (docs/manual).
In a DAW Totality 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 track), 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\TotalityQuest.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\Totality.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.
JUCE comes from ThirdParty/JUCE, else from the sibling Phosphene's checkout, else it is fetched (tag 9.0.1).
TOT_BUILD_PLUGIN=OFF builds the core, the renderer and the tests alone. The release (tests, pluginval, manual,
installer, into dist\): powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File Deploy\build_release.ps1. The Quest app: see
Quest/README.md. TOT_MUTE=1 starts the standalone or the plugin muted; every automated run uses
it.
bin/msvc/tot_render.exe --seed 7 --out track.wav --midi track.mid --stems stems --loops loops
bin/msvc/tot_render.exe --seed 7 --set "compose.style=Dub" --form peak --out dub.wav
bin/msvc/tot_render.exe --seed 2026 --set-minutes 120 --set "set.dramaturgy=Peak" --out set.wav
bin/msvc/tot_render.exe --seed 7 --reroll block4 --reroll rack.ch --save-set track.totset --plan
A track's tempo, key, scale and low end are drawn from its style (compose.auto); --bpm, --low and --form fix
them. Before it renders, tot_render measures every track -- its parts against the kick (printed as balance), its
loudest part's level against the style's target; --bench skips that and the loudness meter (--quality quest: the
headset's level), --plan renders nothing. The WAV carries cue markers (bass in, kick-outs, returns, outro; in a set
every track, swap and loop), also written beside it as JSON. --loops dir writes seamless 4- and 8-bar loops of the
loudest block with kick, hats and perc alone; --stems dir a WAV per element, their sum the mix before the master;
--decks dir a set's decks after their channels; --score-json the score for the evaluation. --reroll unit draws
one part again (form, harmony, rack, rack.<layer>, layers, blocks, block<n>, events, hands,
sounds, figure; in a set track<n> and track<n>.<unit>), leaving everything else as it was; --save-set and
--load-set keep it.
--list prints every parameter, --dump-params f.json describes them; --set "key=value; ..." changes them;
--patterns prints the layers in Tidal mini-notation, --stats how often each part repeats its bar.
python Tools/fetch_refs.py # the reference audio, outside the repository
python Tools/analyze_ref.py # statistics of the references into Tools/ref_stats.json
python Tools/analyze_ref.py track.wav # a render, measured the same way
python Tools/eval_report.py --score track.json --wav track.wav --out report.md # the evaluation (PLAN 13.5)
Totality 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, like the siblings (see LICENSE).