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Description
Imagine travelling in a Winter dream, down a moonlight river, slowly drifting through a huge forest of strangely gnarled, beautiful trees and gigantic ferns. Your breath crackles and turns to icy frost, and every heartbeat echoes through the snowy stillness like a crystal bell. There is something both awesomely beautiful and serene, and awfully terrifying about this place, as if at any moment, the vision will shatter like deadly shards of glass and kill you instantly... you dare not breathe.
Well, I didn't write this music. I let a computer generate it automatically for me. "Generative Music" or "Algorithmic music" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_music) has been around for decades, and it is usually rambling, discordant, non-rhythmic, and just plain ugly sounding. In this case, I actually created one that wasn't too bad, and did very little to make it sound interesting.
First, I went to the "WolframTones" web site (http://tones.wolfram.com/, yes, Wolfram as in the "Mathematica" software) and spent about 1/2 hour twiddling knobs and creating various generations of fractal ambient music until I got one I liked. Then I told it to download/e-mail the MIDI file to me. You can hear the original un-tweaked version here (http://tones.wolfram.com/id/GANRCBTcqQi6ZA1Xp6tBuxsxAzDZgMNtTOgxEvyaBu). Then I imported that MIDI file into Harmony Assistant, because I found that if you just drop the Wolfram MIDI file into GarageBand, it imports all the MIDI instruments into ONE track/instrument in GarageBand for some reason. But loading it into Harmony Assistant separates/re-assigns the MIDI channels so they will properly import into GarageBand as separate instruments. And while it was in Harmony Assistant, I added a first measure for an introduction, and a last measure for an ending chord, and I added a clarinet part as an occasional bit of color. Then I exported it as MIDI and pulled it into Garageband, assigned new GB instruments to each track, and tweaked the instruments to sound crystalline and eerie. And here is the result. Serene and angular. Beautifully asymmetrical. Or maybe, just boring and useless music.
The artwork above is a fractal curve or wave, crashing over the WolframTones graphic display of the generated music, which in turn is converted into actual music notes.
The high-quality music video on DVD is coming soon... in the mean time, here's a peek at the trailer: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOROyAQBgDA)
Thanks to Roxylee for her suggestion to go back to an earlier slower version of the ending.
Well, I didn't write this music. I let a computer generate it automatically for me. "Generative Music" or "Algorithmic music" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_music) has been around for decades, and it is usually rambling, discordant, non-rhythmic, and just plain ugly sounding. In this case, I actually created one that wasn't too bad, and did very little to make it sound interesting.
First, I went to the "WolframTones" web site (http://tones.wolfram.com/, yes, Wolfram as in the "Mathematica" software) and spent about 1/2 hour twiddling knobs and creating various generations of fractal ambient music until I got one I liked. Then I told it to download/e-mail the MIDI file to me. You can hear the original un-tweaked version here (http://tones.wolfram.com/id/GANRCBTcqQi6ZA1Xp6tBuxsxAzDZgMNtTOgxEvyaBu). Then I imported that MIDI file into Harmony Assistant, because I found that if you just drop the Wolfram MIDI file into GarageBand, it imports all the MIDI instruments into ONE track/instrument in GarageBand for some reason. But loading it into Harmony Assistant separates/re-assigns the MIDI channels so they will properly import into GarageBand as separate instruments. And while it was in Harmony Assistant, I added a first measure for an introduction, and a last measure for an ending chord, and I added a clarinet part as an occasional bit of color. Then I exported it as MIDI and pulled it into Garageband, assigned new GB instruments to each track, and tweaked the instruments to sound crystalline and eerie. And here is the result. Serene and angular. Beautifully asymmetrical. Or maybe, just boring and useless music.
The artwork above is a fractal curve or wave, crashing over the WolframTones graphic display of the generated music, which in turn is converted into actual music notes.
The high-quality music video on DVD is coming soon... in the mean time, here's a peek at the trailer: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOROyAQBgDA)
Thanks to Roxylee for her suggestion to go back to an earlier slower version of the ending.
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Roxylee
can do on a computer. I never heard of all this stuff until you told me
about it. Very beautiful fractal math music! I've listened to this 5 times
and it gets prettier and prettier. Downloaded and faved. :-)