Algorithmic

Written in 1992 (at age 14), for an after-school music theory class, using an iterative algorithm (on paper). Came out far too long - I should have exercised artistic license over the math a bit more. I really like the last twenty seconds, though.

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posted by dmd (7 comments total)

You were doing algorithmic composition at age 14? And a damn fine piece to boot, nicely done!
posted by TwoWordReview at 3:05 PM on February 19, 2007

Yea, what TWR said. Did you do the "pshwt" sound with your voice (mouth?)
posted by snsranch at 3:55 PM on February 19, 2007

My algorithm for generation of the musics is O(n^2). Yours is clearl O(n).

Efficient!
posted by sparkletone at 3:57 PM on February 19, 2007

This is neat.
posted by Ynoxas at 4:17 PM on February 19, 2007

sounds cool, personally I could do without the "pshwt." I'm interested in what you used to make this and what you mean by "on paper" ? Did you write out the notes based on an algorithm and then play them, or is it purely computer generated?
posted by dujoducom at 10:44 PM on February 19, 2007

Surprisingly, it resembles traditional Chinese music.
posted by ignignokt at 11:00 PM on February 19, 2007

My memory is pretty hazy, but I think I wrote out a few chords on paper, and then came up with a bunch of transform-over-time functions, and some functions that transformed the inputs to the transforms. I iterated over those functions by hand and wrote out the results on paper, then entered it into the synthesizer's sequencer.

The "pshwt" sound, as I recall, was originally some sort of very faint gong. It got mangled in the conversion between the Yamaha SY77 file and the General MIDI file somewhere - this existed as a .mid from 1992-1999, at which point I rendered it as a MP3.
posted by dmd at 1:34 PM on February 20, 2007