On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 11:33:38PM +0100, Aidan Mark Humphreys wrote: Long long long ago I played with a program that generated music using the Seive of Eratosthenes. I think it came from sunsite (before it was ibiblio, before it was metalab), and I think I had to hack it to get it working. I think it was called "seive"... Even longer ago there was a program that generated sequencer output based on a picture you gave it. Have no idea what the name of this was. Basically, both sounded awful. -- Ross Vandegrift ross(a)willow.seitz.com A Pope has a Water Cannon. It is a Water Cannon. He fires Holy-Water from it. It is a Holy-Water Cannon. He Blesses it. It is a Holy Holy-Water Cannon. He Blesses the Hell out of it. It is a Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon. He has it pierced. It is a Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon. He makes it official. It is a Canon Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon. Batman and Robin arrive. He shoots them.

On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 11:33:38PM +0100, Aidan Mark Humphreys wrote: my first thought is to use not a program but a programming language. Four development tools that come to mind: 1) Pd. haven't used it much, yet, but it seems quite powerful. 2) KeyKit. A MIDI gui environment for algorithmic composition. scriptable IIRC. I played with it for a few minutes a long time ago, don't know its current status. 3) omde / pmask (pythonsound.sf.net). A set of python libraries for algorithmic composition. Very flexible since you have the full power of python at your disposal and can subclass anything in the omde / pmask libs. However, it currently only creates csound scores as output. (I want to change that.) 4) saol / sasl (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/book/) as implemented in sfront (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro). sort of a "new improved" csound; the sasl score language is fairly simple and doesn't have many features, but the saol orchestra language allows instruments to start and control other instruments, which can be very powerful. The most important addition vs. csound is the ability to easily define your own "opcodes" (instrument building blocks) which can be used just like the core opcodes that are defined by the language. And, which might be relevant for the generative music discussion, sfront can compile your saol / sasl files into C code which your favorite compiler can turn into an executable. So instead of distributing a recording of one particular run, you could distribute executable binaries to your listeners! -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com "Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is made - today!"