mindtram.txt
27 july 2003, john saylor

NOTES

- the music was made by grabbing bits from a source file, tweaking them
  in various ways, and rearranging them in new orders
- one of the musical problems i keep coming back to is how to make
  coherent music without 'tunes'
- i think the ambiance of city trains is musical in its own right
  [well- only if interspersed with birdsong]
- using random processes in music comes naturally to me
- the score is written as source code for the software that generates the
  music
- feldman's string quintet helped me to write mindtram  


TECH

- audigy allowed me to take sounds out of the traffic.wav file, do some
  initial processing on them, and later, shape the final mixdown
- with perl, i wrote a program to recontextualize the sounds as a csound
  '.sco' file
- csound was used to generate the new audio, and to provide a framework
  with which i could conceptualize and experiment with the music itself
- i did it all on win2k [yeech] because it was easier than compiling
  everything on linux [but i felt so dirty afterwards ...]
- mathematically, i used the golden section to help with proportion, and
  a random number generator to handle some small scale details
- (O) open audio license
- MD5 (mindtram.mp3) = 698ce21060b96d162b99ec6fcba8b649


BIO

- the music i remember from my childhood is the pop music of that time:
  motown, the beatles, ...
- i became a musician by playing guitar and bass guitar in folk/rock
  groups
- i studied music composition until i was granted a terminal degree
- then, i became a software engineer to support my children
- i use computers to make music because they are amazing musical
  instruments [they also follow directions and are ready to 'rehearse'
  whenever i am]
- i write music for many reasons; some conscious, others less so