I just want to share a AHA-moment and nothing more than my admiration for OM...

The function closest-path is documented to voice-lead chords, which already in my view is a great use-case.

But do you know that it also helps to get a cohesive monophonic line from otherwise pretty scattered pitch collection as its often the result of a stochastic generation processes ?

Most of you will know this already, having a musician background and it might feel trivial (the mere name voice-leading already indicates it).

So I am writing this more to share my surprise and learning for those coming rather from „outside“.

I was so nudged by the docu which covers chords, so that I did not recognize that its highly generalizing.

Example:

;; Random noise
(setf vector (gen-noise 32 :seed 42))

;; Map to 3 Octaves
,; OK I am making this up, its just an example, 
;; showing what one can expect for stochastic material.

(setf pitch-mat (vector-to-pitch '(c3 c6) vector))
(pitch-list-plot pitch-mat)

With closest-path :

;; Voice leading also for melodies :-)
(setf pitch-mat-vl (closest-path pitch-mat))
(pitch-list-plot pitch-mat-vl)

Very interesting

(closest-path (vector-to-pitch '(c3 c6) (gen-noise 32 :seed 42)))

I agree, very interesting and I didn't know this possible monophonic usage of closest path.

Generally I use vector-smooth function to get more melodic material from vectors but this alternative is very interesting, thank you.

(pitch-list-plot
 (vector-to-pitch
  '(c3 c6)
  (vector-smooth
   0.02
   (gen-noise 32 :seed 42))))

Comparison:

Given (setf v (gen-noise 32 :seed 42).

Code	Plot
(vector-to-pitch '(c3 c6) v)
(vector-to-pitch '(c3 c6) (vector-smooth 0.02 v))
(closest-path (vector-to-pitch '(c3 c6) v))
(relative-closest-path (vector-to-pitch '(c3 c6) v))