Spreadsheet as Music Tracker-Sequencer, with LibreOffice (nee OpenOffice)

Look at a music software interface – particularly a tracker-style interface – and you might easily see something resembling a spreadsheet.

So, why not gaze into the cells of a spreadsheet and begin to imagine music?

Karlsruhe-based electronic artist and programmer Patrick, cappel:nord, had just such a flight of fancy about office software. He explains:

A spreadsheet could be used as a music sequencer. If you know your spreadsheet software well, the built-in functions can be used. I don’t! I also struggle with the interface 🙂 The last time I used spreadsheets is 10 years ago or so.

This was the second time trying this, so I make a lot of mistakes. It’s more a proof of concept. This was a 3-hour hack so don’t expect much from the source code. But here it is:

http://www.cappel-nord.de/files/libre-jam.zip

You have to figure out how it works for yourself. I don’t give any support :-).

I did it for the lulz.

Lots of similar brilliance, sounds, and geekery – like a pixel matrix for Processing, audio players, code, and music – at his blog (not recently updated, but worth plumbing anyway):

http://blog.cappel-nord.de/

Thanks to headchant for the tip!

As it happens, in the first few months of CDM’s existence, I wrote up a little story on what people were doing with Microsoft Excel:
Microsoft Excel for Music: Applications Bizarre and Useful

Applications: building a drum set, a drum machine with sequencer, databases of music, music library tracking, and even a tuning calculator. I’m sure there are more.

I hear these spreadsheets also do something with numbers and finance, but where’s the fun in that?