UCS (Untitled Composition Software)

compose here

A composition-first music environment

DAWs are where music gets finished. This is where music gets figured out.

This is a space for thinking, experimenting, and planning.

Built-in sounds let you hear ideas immediately as you work.

play here

Connect together boxes to make music

Our software borrows from video games, because music software doesn’t have to think like a recording studio.

Nowadays, a musician is more likely to have played Minecraft than sat behind a mixing desk.

This isn’t a game pretending to be a tool. Or a toy.

It’s serious composition software inspired by video games, because they are excellent at teaching complex systems without overwhelming the player.

game here

Inspired by video games

Our interface is designed for game-controller and WASD-keys as the primary input.

Eventually, this will run on games consoles, as well as MacOS, Windows and Linux.

We use 3D space to help organize your thoughts.

Musical objects (a melody, rhythm, tuning system etc.) are represented by boxes on a plateau. Connecting two compatible boxes together creates a new box, that can be connected to further boxes, and so on.

You “craft” your music by combining musical elements, just like a survival game.

And if you run out of room, you can inifinitely nest the 3D spaces. It’s an infinite canvas, just … different …

conceptualize here

A place to dream about music

At the heart of the software is a highly sophisticated musical representation engine, built from the ground up to be able to handle as many different types of music as possible.

We treat music as a system of relationships, rather than a sequence of disconnected events.

variation here

Everything is connected

A “pitch” to us is always “higher than” or “lower than” another pitch, never just an isolated MIDI number.

This allows us to create a deep variation system, that tracks and reacts to how music changes. A melodic idea can generate a family of variations.

Change the source, and everything updates instantly.

structure here

Tools for form

Form is never a case of copy-paste. Each repetition knows where it came from and how it relates to what came before.

Musical ideas can be built, connected, reused, and transformed, with changes propagating instantly across the whole piece. Here, music is a system.

music theories here

There's more than one way to make music

We don’t think of music theory. We think of music theories.

We don’t just support one way of thinking, making and dreaming about music.

There is no single musical tradition assumed here. No default tempo. No fixed meter. No privileged tuning system.

Music software is used all over the world. We design with a global audience in mind.

efficiency here

Fast, small, powerful

The software is small, efficient, and optimized.

It is designed to be run alongside your DAW, so it does not hog resources. It is less than 20MB on disk.