This might be one of those cases where I really really wanted to cap the strip with a certain image maybe kinda a little. I can totally see Data as a Rush fan, possibly because of this video.
As you may have noticed, I did minimal toning this time around. I’ll level with you: I’ve been trying to get used to new medication, and the transition hasn’t been easy. In dealing with the personal side of my life, the creative side is taking a hit here and there, and for that I apologize. I’m doing all of this so I can be the best I can be; it’s just taking longer than I’d hoped. Thank you for bearing with me.
Logic dictates I should have probably done a more shallow topic, but I am just not all that smart. This is one of those ones I’ve wanted to do for a while, since the topic fascinates me: randomizing one or all of a song with pre-written parts, or even generating a song entirely from scratch. Then I started to listen to some of these compositions and…yikes. The 18th century stuff is boring, since it’s all slight variations of a minuet or a polonaise or a waltz or some other damn thing. And the avant-garde stuff? Call me a square, call me a plebian, but I just can’t take most of that shit. Computer-generated music is easier to stomach — it has, y’know, actual melodies — but you can tell it’s inorganic, especially when you get into Markov chains. You never notice how much pauses matter in music until you encounter a song that’s just crammed with notes. There’s an interesting project called CRaTER that turns cosmic radiation detection into music, with different parameters translating into different instruments, pitch and tempo; you can listen here. And the Synestesia art project makes songs out of image data from photos. There’s neat stuff like that floating about.
If you’re still interested in the old fashioned Musikalisches Würfelspiel (god, copy-pasting that gets super old) mechanic, there’s an iPhone/iPad app called Mozart’s Dice Game, so called because the composer was thought to have come up with at least two ‘spiels of his own. It’s good for novelty, but that’s about where it ends.
Would “Music To Die Alone In Space To” fall under this category, or is it not random enough? Having listened to 4 versions of it so far, I can say, you can kind of hear the skeleton of the songs in each version, but they can be very different, depending on what tweaks have been made.
Hang in there, hon! *hugs*
I would say yes, it does! I thought about that while researching this comic. For those not familiar, “Music to Die Alone in Space To” was a Kickstarter project where every backer received a unique, one-hour soundscape, with parameters for generative algorithms chosen by them. If a backer chose not to choose, the artist chose for them, still rendering a one-of-a-kind product. It’s a very cool concept that I hope bore out its potential.
Being a programmer and musician, this is a subject I’ve thought a lot about. Every time I try making a pass at executing on it I’m immediately reminded that I’m no good at large-scale code architecture. Or composition. Music is bloody complicated.