ambient

An Ableton Live 12 Extension for writing generative ambient soundscapes. Right-click a MIDI track → Generate Ambient… to open a tabbed dialog, pick a key/mode and a generator, and it writes looping MIDI clips — building the tracks, scenes, and (optionally) a tuned reverb + delay chain for you.

Everything is generated as ordinary Live clips and devices, so nothing is locked up: tweak the notes, swap the instrument, remap the harmony.

Generators

Tab	What it makes	Idea
Drift	N looping clips of coprime bar lengths (3, 5, 7, 11…), one per track, all in one scene.	The loops realign only after the product of their lengths, so a handful of short clips never repeat their combined state for hours — Eno's Music for Airports trick.
Bloom	An evolving chord progression: one clip per scene on a single track, launched in turn.	Each scene holds one diatonic chord a scale-step along the chosen motion; the register layers become the wide vertical voicing of that one clip.
Aleatoric	One long clip scattered by probability — off-grid, humanized, drawn from the key.	A self-contained generative shimmer, weighted toward chord tones and re-shuffled every loop. Density, register, note length and weighting are all adjustable.
Rhythm	A looping drum pattern on the GM drum map — Four-on-floor, Boom-bap, 808/Trap, Half-time, Ambient, or Euclidean.	Drops an empty Drum Rack on the track; load an 808 (or any) kit onto it. Evolve fires hits probabilistically.
Bass	A low-register loop on the tonic — Sustain (held sub), Pulse (root each beat), or Walk (root → fifth → octave).	A foundation on its own; in Perform it follows the Bloom chord roots.
Play	Turns the track into a ready-to-play instrument — instrument + FX, an optional Arpeggiator, armed for Push's Note mode. No clips.	The voice you play live over the loops, in tune with the current key.
Perform	A Push-ready rig composing all of the above — bed + progression + rhythm + bass + shimmer + Play instrument, in one key.	Assembles the loops-plus-instrument setup for live playing (see below).

Drift, Bloom, Aleatoric, Rhythm, Bass and Play each set up one "instrument" (a track); Perform composes them into a single rig, within Push's 8 columns.

The generators use Live's per-note probability and velocity drift (the "Evolve" option) so the texture keeps shifting on every loop rather than repeating exactly.

Playing live (Perform + Push)

The Perform tab builds a whole rig in the current key:

• a Drift bed (one track per phasing layer), a Rhythm loop (a Drum Rack — load an 808 kit) and an Aleatoric shimmer, each a single clip in the first scene so they loop continuously,
• the Bloom chords and an optional Bass running down their own columns — one clip per chord, with the bass following each chord's root,
• an armed play instrument track — empty, ready for Push's Note mode.

Launch the first scene to start the loops and first chord, then tap down the Bloom and Bass clips to move the harmony — the loops keep running underneath. Bass defaults on, rhythm off; the bed caps at 3 layers so the whole rig stays within Push's 8-column grid. An optional Soften mix drops a gentle high-cut on the master to tame harsh frequencies. Clips take their track's colour, so each column reads as one colour.

The extension doesn't talk to Push directly — it doesn't need to. Push is a live view of the Live Set, so everything generated (clips, scenes, colours) shows up and is playable on the hardware. A couple of things stay in your hands: set Live's scale first (the SDK can read it but not set it — everything generates in-key to match), and advance chords by tapping the Bloom pads rather than launching whole scenes (a scene launch would stop the bed; a clip launch leaves it running). To start: launch the first scene (bed + first chord), then tap down the Bloom column while you play over the top on the armed track.

Modes

The Key chooser offers modes suited to ambient — Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian, and the two pentatonics — and prefills from Live's current scale. Every generated note is snapped into the chosen key.

Sound

With Add reverb & delay on, each track gets its chosen instrument followed by a Reverb and a Delay, tuned wetter than their defaults so a launched clip already sounds ambient. Device and parameter tuning is best-effort — if a device name or parameter differs in your Live build, the clip still generates; you just add the effects yourself.

Install (the easy way)

You don't need Node or the SDK just to use it:

1. Download ambient-<version>.ablx from the Releases page.
2. In Live, open Settings → Extensions and drag the .ablx onto the page.
3. Enable it; restart Live if prompted.

Use it: right-click a MIDI track → Generate Ambient…, choose a generator, then Generate. Switch to Session view (Tab) and launch the new scene(s).

The rest of this README is for developing the extension from source.

Requirements

• Ableton Live 12.4.5 Suite Beta (Extensions are Suite + beta only)
• Node.js ≥ 22.11 (the SDK suggests v24 LTS)
• pnpm (npm i -g pnpm, or via corepack enable pnpm)

One-time setup

From this folder:

pnpm install

This pulls the Ableton SDK + CLI from the local .tgz files in ../extensions-sdk-1.0.0-beta.0/ and the build tools from the registry. pnpm-workspace.yaml already approves esbuild's build script, which pnpm otherwise blocks by default.

Then in Live: Settings → Extensions → enable Developer Mode. Without it, npm start cannot connect.

The host path is set in .env (EXTENSION_HOST_PATH). If your app is named differently, edit .env.

Run it

pnpm start

This builds src/extension.ts → dist/extension.js and loads it into Live. You should see ambient extension activated. in the terminal. Right-click a MIDI track → Generate Ambient….

Test

pnpm test

Runs the music-theory checks (src/theory.test.ts) outside Live — scale snapping, coprime phasing lengths, voicings, chord building, motion shapes, and the generators' output. Pure functions only, so no Live required.

Scripts

Script	What it does
pnpm start	Dev build + load into Live's Extension Host
pnpm test	Run the theory unit tests
pnpm build:dev	Dev bundle (sourcemaps)
pnpm build	Production bundle (minified)
pnpm package	Production build → shareable .ablx archive

Files

• src/extension.ts — the extension: context-menu action, dialog, and the Drift/Bloom/Perform track-and-clip builders
• src/theory.ts — pure, testable music theory: modes, voicings, phasing lengths, chords, motion, and the generators
• src/theory.test.ts — theory unit tests (pnpm test)
• src/interface.html — the tabbed dialog, inlined into the bundle as a string
• manifest.json — name, entry point, API version Live reads
• build.ts — esbuild bundler (single-file CJS output)
• .env — path to Live's Extension Host (gitignored, machine-specific)