I need to write some tunes for assessment. No, actually I need to write some code that generates sound… haha nice distinction. That is feasible. In a tutorial a couple weeks back we were shown that almost all western music can be simplified to a set of rules, and therefore a program can use these rules to generate music. I’d still need to be in control of the process, but it means I can give order to what would otherwise just be noise!
I tend to believe the power of generative process flexes most strongly when the technology does the grunt work and the human uses her powerful pattern recognition skills to find anomolies and interesting areas of generated data. I’m sure when you attempt to write code to write music, you end up adjusting your code to get the sound you want, as opposed to letting it run completely wild, so in the end you are crafting the sound anyway, just indirectly.
During the tute we were shown a simple demonstration of these rules. I noticed that amongst all the randomness of the bars of music, many bars were quite aesthetically pleasing. So I’d like to write a generator that lets the user easily keep bars they like and toss bars they don’t.
