Almost-found sounds
Steph Waller, as she often does, turned up something interesting: the “two-dimensional sculptures of playable music” by James Plakovic, which he calls MusicArt™. It’s an intriguing idea: drawings which incorporate actual musical staves. (She links to one called “World Beat Music,” set to a Mercator-projection world map.)
This, to me at least, invites one of those chicken/egg comparisons: do you draw the picture first and then see how it sounds, or do you sketch out the basic sound you want and make the picture fit it? I have no talent for either of these things, but the sound of some of them reminded me of an ancient piece of software I still have kicking around these parts: Lars Kinderman’s MusiNum, a fractal music generator. It’s simple in the extreme: give it a starting point, pick some MIDI instruments, and let it rip. I have a couple of dozen files produced by this program, all but one of them identified and credited in the help files. (They’re also here, in the program’s native file format and also as MIDI sequences.) The one outlier in the bunch? It’s dated later than the others, and has a filename on it that looks like the sort of post-DOS syntax I was using back in 1997. Is this something I actually threw together? I wouldn’t swear to it, not today. Still, there’s a vague Steve Reich-on-Vivarin sense to it that sounds like something I’d want to keep. Maybe I’ll let it run for a few minutes and melt it down into an MP3 or something.
unimpressed »
15 November 2009 · 1:58 pm
Must be something wrong on my end because I can’t listen to the songs on IE or Firefox…..
CGHill »
15 November 2009 · 2:37 pm
I had some trouble with the MIDI sequences, which turned out to be a QuickTime issue.
unimpressed »
16 November 2009 · 1:06 pm
The QuickTime logo pops up and then goes away. I haven’t the foggiest notion as to what needs tweaked.