E-Mail This Article to a Friend Changing tunes Doruk Somunkiran left a successful career in diplomacy and business in Turkey to come study at Berklee. Will his new interactive software change the way we listen to music? BY MIKE MILIARD

Doruk Somunkiran sits at a small table in Starbucks, across Mass Ave from Berklee College of Music, and leans forward toward the glowing screen of his gleaming titanium WinBook. "Here, I want you to see something," he says in a gently lilting accent, as he hands over a pair of headphones. "Put these on. They are not very loud, so I’ll turn the volume up."

On the screen sits an empty, elliptical orange-red stage under a bulb-ringed marquee advertising CLUB HABANERO. It’s surrounded on all sides by clip-art icons depicting musical instruments: a drum kit, a trumpet, a grand piano, an upright bass. Hover the cursor over the drum set, then drag it downward toward the stage, and the ellipse lights up yellow as a steady but tricky drumbeat falls in, calling to mind sultry Caribbean evenings. In a small green screen below the marquee, an animated man and woman are entangled in an impassioned salsa dance, but the rhythm they’re moving to is still spare. Drag in the tom-tom-drum icon toward stage left, and it gets more complex. Sidle in the conga drums next, and the beat is even more syncopated, its low end darting and weaving. Some music? Head to stage right and drag over the piano — in comes a jaunty Buena Vista Social Club–type vamp. Next, pop in the trumpet, brash and staccato. As a gruff rum-and-cigar-cured voice hollers intermittently — ¡Ándale! ¡Caliente! — the tune evolves. Rising and falling continually, the music changes as you add and subtract instruments, mixing and matching their combinations.

It’s an early glimpse of what just may be the future of music. This computer program, Habanero, is the latest edition of a type of PC software Somunkiran has been working on for just a few months but that is already being downloaded worldwide. Habanero — and especially its more techno-oriented precursors, CoolSpool and Rave-X — puts the listener in the driver’s seat, making possible the manipulation of sound, the composition of tracks on the spot. Blurring the line between artist and fan, Somunkiran’s multiplicity of musical snippets blends together at the user’s command, combining to create a near-infinite variety of arrangements. Technology similar to this has been available to musicians for some time, but Somunkiran says his is among the first styled for the casual listener. His user-friendly design and laboriously constructed loops make it simple for even the non-musical to create hyper-complex melodies. And he’s just getting started.

It CAME TO HIM just this past summer. Somunkiran, 36, left Ankara, Turkey, in 1998 to come to Berklee on scholarship, and graduated in 2000 with a degree in contemporary writing and production. Since then, he’s worked primarily as a freelance producer and arranger, recording radio jingles, scoring the soundtracks of some independent films, even working with the occasional hip-hop artist. But he wanted to find a way to get the listener more proactively involved with the musical process.

"I was thinking about music technology," he says. "There are so many new things going on right now, but the listener is being excluded from them. I was wondering if there was a way to get the listener involved, because all the technology goes to the people who deal with music production right now. And I figured, with my knowledge of programming and music skills, I figured I’d be able to write up a program, and make this technology available to the listener who’s not a musician. I know how to program, so why shouldn’t I be able to do that?" So he did.

There are other programs out there that offer similar capabilities. Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, allows Mac users to raid its cache of hundreds of prerecorded loops and use various effects and editing tools to build their own music. But novices still need some inkling of how a song is constructed to make it really sing. Noodle Heaven (Noodleheaven.com) is another downloadable program that, according to its literature, allows "musicians and game designers to come together and create interactive music the way we’ve always wanted to, but never been able to," incorporating 3-D graphics. But CoolSpool, Rave-X, and now Habanero are especially straightforward and user-friendly. Somunkiran has done all the work — how you arrange his music from there is up to you.

Somunkiran is a professional musician, who’s won a slew of scholarships and awards at Berklee and is, in the words of a colleague, "one of the best arrangers I’ve ever seen come through the college." But he is actually a rank amateur when it comes to software. "I’m quite new to programming," Somunkiran says. He essentially taught himself, with some guidance and troubleshooting help from others in the online community. Before long, he was on his way. "After I started working on this, I realized that I really enjoy programming. It’s very logical, and it involves a lot of head-scratching. There are problems you need to get over." Does he see similarities between composing music and programming software? "Yes, I can see a lot. If you have a bug somewhere in your composition, it’s going to stick out really bad. The listener, even if she knows nothing about music theory, is going to say, ‘Oof! I don’t like that.’ Same thing in programming. If you forget to type a close-brackets or something, you’ll be scratching your head, where did I go wrong?"

If Somunkiran’s interactive programs had a quick conception, they’ve had an even quicker evolution since they arrived on the market — a trial version of each is downloadable for free from Sessionx.com, but full versions cost $15 — with each successive version expanding or improving aspects of the last.

CoolSpool came first, in August. Metallic, menacing, and monocular, much like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the program’s interface opens on the screen silently, its red eye pulsating, a hungry "mouth" waiting to be fed any or all of eight colored balls. But its rudimentary appearance belies its complex musical innards. Those balls each represent 20 or so loops played by a different instrument group. Light yellow is acoustic drums, golden represents hard and insistent synthesized beats. Lavender is an electric bass, and violet means harder, techno effects. While light green represents electric and acoustic guitar, and staccato organ, dark green calls up narcotized atmospheric washes. Light blue summons jazzy guitar trills and synthesized brass bursts, dark blue is frenetic structured noise. If that all seems a bit much, it’s not. Simply manipulate the sound by dragging and dropping and adding and subtracting balls at will. The sheer variety of sounds that results is striking, from futuristic deep groove to ’70s-sounding funk lite to bass-heavy aggression to FM jazz to thrumming, mind-numbing techno.

Rave-X, which was launched in September, appears much the same as CoolSpool, but looks less like HAL and more like a waffle iron. Again, it uses eight marble-like balls, but this time, they represent either straight techno or Euro-style house music (a more booming, aggressive subset of techno). So popping the little light-yellow pill conjures a pounding bass drum and skittish snare that sound straight from an Ibiza dance floor. Exchanging it for the darker one brings up a harsh, frenetic beat that evokes the flashing lights of a dance hall in some northern-England industrial town. Adding a purple ball weaves in rhythmic electronic wheezes; then, a green overlays stroboscopic interstellar signals as a blue ball adds whorls and twirls of eerie mechanical melody. Replacing four darker balls with four lighter ones changes the scene dramatically to a fluorescent reverie, airy and dreamy. Mixing and matching at varying speeds takes the exploration further and further out toward some sonic Thule.

But it never sounds ugly or cacophonous. So carefully did Somunkiran calibrate the tempo and key of each of the intertwining loops that they can combine with each other seamlessly. "It’s pretty complex as far as being able to get that many different rhythmic loops at the same tempo, and allowing you to interchange them however you like," says Robert Bloodworth, one of Somunkiran’s former co-workers at Berklee. "And then, within those loops, let’s say you bring in one instrument, after a few bars, you’re gonna start hearing it change up a little bit. So it’s endless. To be able to combine so many loops is fascinating, for it to all sound decent [rather than] having just a hodgepodge of horrible sounding things. You can’t make any errors, basically. It’s all gonna sound great."

"You never listen to the same thing twice. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope," says Somunkiran. "It’s out of my control once you start running it. I don’t know what kind of pieces it’s going to put together." That’s why it was so crucial that he ensure everything be in sync. "CoolSpool and Rave-X each have 80 or 90 pieces. So you have to come up with 90 musical pieces that in any combination would sound good together. That was really hard to do, the biggest challenge." But the end result was rewarding. Sometimes, if Somunkiran leaves the program running for a while, the music’s random mutations take on a timbre that surprises even him. "I’ll be like, ‘Ooh, this is cool!’ It brings me such a combination that I have never heard of before."