I'm Ilya Minin (Eli) — an artist and creative technologist working between experimental music, vocal synthesis, generative systems, interactive media, animation, games and digital folklore.

My projects often begin as software and become something more ambiguous: a voicebank, a song, a machine-like interface, an archive, a field recording, an audiovisual work, a game prototype, or a fictional system with its own rules.

A large part of my practice concerns landscape, infrastructure, memory, Japanese folklore, ritual, forgotten voices and digital archaeology. Code is not only a production tool here — it is part of the artistic material itself.

I make systems that can remember, mutate, sing, and document things.

• 🎛️ Generative & experimental audio — Sonic Pi, procedural music, IDM-oriented rhythm, ambient systems and live-coded performance
• 🗣️ Vocal synthesis — UTAU, OpenUtau, Synthesizer V, voicebanks, phonemization, tuning and expressive synthesis
• 🧠 Generative music software — lyric processing, melody, motifs, timing, dynamics, pitch expression and UST generation
• 🏚️ Interactive archives — web interfaces where documentation and media become navigable environments
• 🗾 Japanese / Fuji-related research — field recordings, yokai, invented folklore, landscape, shrines and infrastructure
• 🎞️ Audiovisual production — Blender animation, CGI, music videos, visual systems and experimental film
• 🎮 Game experiments — Unity and Unreal prototypes, interaction and environmental design
• 🧪 Creative software — Python, JavaScript, Ruby/Sonic Pi, Max/MSP, Blender tooling and experimental pipelines

text-to-ust →

A procedural Japanese lyric → UTAU UST generator designed as a generative starting point and tuning assistant, combining mora-aware phonemization, phrase analysis, procedural melody, scale/range constraints, motif memory, deterministic generation, timing and dynamics heuristics, pitch-accent-aware behaviour, bends and microtonal expression.

友人 (Eugene) UTAU · 茜音イーライ (Akane Iirai) · Akane Iirai character project

Original singing-synthesizer voices treated as both technical instruments and artistic characters.

eli_lab →

The long-running personal creative workspace connecting web experiments, tools, visual material, sound and prototypes.

jihanki-site →

An interactive archive presented as a Japanese vending-machine interface, bringing together field notes, photographs, sounds, music, video, scripts, yokai research, Sonic Pi experiments and project documentation.

A second-pass inventory of the account currently finds 40 repositories: 28 public and 12 private. This profile is a map of the practice rather than a conventional software portfolio: some repositories are finished works, some are production archives, some are active systems, and some are tiny or unfinished experiments.

• sonicpi_eli_lab — private Sonic Pi laboratory containing reusable musical infrastructure, construction packs, live-performance projects, drafts and archives.
• Belial_8 — Max/MSP live computer-music and sound-art platform for real-time sample manipulation and semi-algorithmic performance.
• eli_lab-pattern-generator — private procedural pattern-generation infrastructure for generative music.
• text-to-ust — procedural Japanese lyric-to-UST generation.
• eli_lab_sv_scripts — Synthesizer V scripting experiments.
• eli_lab-voicebox — vocal-synthesis and voice workflow tooling.

• eugene-utau — 友人 / Eugene UTAU voicebank project.
• Iirai — 茜音イーライ / Akane Iirai voicebank material.
• akane_iirai — Akane Iirai character project.

• eli_lab — long-running creative workspace.
• jihanki-site — interactive Japanese vending-machine archive and fieldwork system.
• eli_lab_official — public ELI LAB website.
• Portfolio-site — earlier portfolio website.
• parazit-web — experimental web project.
• eli_lab-multimedia-framework — multimedia framework and experimental production infrastructure.
• eli_lab_pipeline_hub — Blender pipeline infrastructure.
• eli_lab-the-poster — small visual project.
• eli_lab-the-formatter — formatting / workflow experiment.
• eli_lab-the-previewer — previewing experiment related to the multimedia workflow.
• JPTrainer — small Japanese-language learning experiment.
• eli_lab_organiser — private internal organization / workflow tooling.
• template_repository — private repository template / infrastructure.

• ewproject — 2023 CGI abstract animation archive preserving Blender characters, scenes, assets and production material.
• Antokolskyj — completed historical Blender animation made with Anna Yuytova for GRIG Film, centred on Mark Antokolsky and his historical context.
• Pleiir — unofficial audiovisual clip directed, animated and technically developed by Eli with Spalah.
• Daly-Syndrome — private in-development philosophical / psychological horror animation with a large Blender production archive, characters, locations and experimental visual material.
• outsider — private unfinished / developing visual project archive.
• eli_lab-blender-scripts — private Blender automation and production scripts.
• eli_lab-belial — private source / development material associated with the Belial line of work.

• gonkiitochka — low-poly Unity arcade racing game developed during a week-long hackathon; Eli contributed level design, sound design, models and lighting.
• Assembly-Line-Challenge — abandoned Unreal Engine 4.27 arcade prototype about assembling PCs on a conveyor belt.
• sleepdom — art-house immersive-sim action game experiment.

• punk_exhibition — exhibition-related experiment.
• sashaeb — personal CV experiment.
• metaliminal — very small experimental / work-in-progress repository.
• slavabogu — private project archive.
• who-is-ellie — private experimental / personal project.
• word_doc_filler — private utility experiment.

The private repositories are deliberately mentioned without links. They document important parts of the current practice without exposing private source code or direct repository navigation.

Private audio-reactive visual MV editor. A PySide6 / Qt desktop application with deterministic rendering, cached audio analysis, layered visual effects, project/preset files, timeline controls, preview, diagnostics and FFmpeg-based export. It is evolving toward a general-purpose audiovisual production workstation, including future direct manipulation, keyframes, GPU preview, render queues and subtitle/SRT workflows.

Private generative music laboratory. Its architecture separates reusable core systems, construction packs and actual projects, with READY / PRODUCTION / DRAFTS / ARCHIVE states. It is the main environment for long-form generative live sessions and increasingly complex evolving musical systems.

Private long-form animation / narrative project. Began as a 2019 psychological-horror script and developed into a substantial Blender production archive containing characters, locations, dreamscapes, glitches, tests and production material.

• eli_lab-pattern-generator — procedural musical-pattern research.
• eli_lab-blender-scripts — Blender automation and production tooling.
• eli_lab_organiser — internal project / asset organization tooling.
• eli_lab-belial — private Belial development material.
• outsider — private visual experiment.
• who-is-ellie — private experimental / personal work.
• slavabogu — private project archive.
• word_doc_filler — private document utility.
• template_repository — private template infrastructure.

Private repositories may later become public, remain production archives, or stay internal. Their inclusion here is about showing the continuity of the work, not claiming that every project is finished or publicly accessible.

                              ELI LAB
                                 │
          ┌──────────────────────┼──────────────────────┐
          │                      │                      │
        SOUND                  VOICE                 IMAGE
          │                      │                      │
   Sonic Pi / Belial       UTAU / SynthV          Blender / CGI
   generative systems      voicebanks              animation
   live performance        phonemization           games
          │                      │                      │
          └──────────────────────┼──────────────────────┘
                                 │
                         CREATIVE SOFTWARE
                                 │
               ┌─────────────────┼─────────────────┐
               │                 │                 │
             TOOLS             ARCHIVE           MEDIA
               │                 │                 │
          generators          JIHANKI          MV editor
          pipelines           websites         audiovisual
          organisers          fieldwork        performance
               │                 │                 │
               └─────────────────┼─────────────────┘
                                 │
                  LANDSCAPE / MEMORY / FOLKLORE

The repositories are not isolated software projects. They form a network of instruments, archives and production systems around the same artistic practice.

LANGUAGE / TOOL        USE
────────────────────────────────────────────
Python                 generative audio, UST tools, automation
JavaScript / HTML/CSS  interactive archives, websites, creative UI
Ruby / Sonic Pi        procedural music and live-coded systems
Max/MSP                sample manipulation and sound-art systems
UTAU / OpenUtau        vocal synthesis and voicebank development
Synthesizer V          custom scripts and vocal workflows
C++ / Qt               experimental application work
Blender / Python       3D, animation and production tooling
PyTorch                machine-learning experiments

I care about modularity, reproducibility, inspectable systems and tools that can be reused inside creative workflows.

I am interested in the point where a technical object starts behaving like a cultural object.

A voicebank can become a character.

A script can become a ritual.

A vending machine can become an archive.

A melody generator can become a collaborator.

A game prototype can become a record of a particular way of imagining a place.

A Blender file can become an archaeological record of a film, game or fictional world.

A rendering tool can become part of the aesthetic itself.

That is the territory I'm currently exploring.

Website · YouTube · Instagram · Telegram · Behance · Discord

For collaboration, project questions or creative/technical exchange:

ilyaminineli@gmail.com