Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- people:max_ottesen:project:fake_paper [2014/10/06 19:37] – mottese
+++ people:max_ottesen:project:fake_paper [2014/10/19 16:49] (current) – mottese
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-====== The Music of Life ======
+====== Distributed Composition of Abstract Music ======
 ===== Abstract =====
-I am using the Movable Feast Machine to implement a system for generating music. We do this by first creating a few elements to represent some of the important aspects of music. Two of our elements are the Staff and the Note. The Staff element is a self-replicating, immovable object that makes a large grid, each point on the grid knowing its relative position. The Note element represents a musical tone in a specified scale. Each note is immovable and knows whether it is an accidental or not. A note's horizontal position relative to the Staff grid will tell you what scale degree it is and what octave it is in. Our third and final element is the Composer. It floats freely around the MFM and moves Notes according to basic music theory rules based on the other Notes that are around. They also replicate themselves or create new notes out of Res elements with some probability. The Composer has some adjustable parameters such as the scale they are working in, their tolerance for dissonance or tension, and how often it will create new Notes. By placing a Composer in the MFM along with a DReg, it will eventually start to convert the Res that the DReg creates into Notes and more Composers. If we interpret the MFMs state as music and listen to it every so often, we will be able to hear the changes that the Composer is making.
+Music is a form of art previously explored exclusively by humans. With the invention of computers, computer-generated music has become an interesting branch of music to look at. We decided to take the approach of generating music from an artificial life standpoint. We have done this by creating a cellular automaton that runs inside of the Moveable Feast Machine. By varying parameters such as how likely we are to leave dissonant sounds alone, what kind of chords we wish to produce, or the type of musical scale we want to work with, we can listen to the results change and improve over time.
-===== (Hoped for) Conclusion =====
-By interpreting our MFM states as musical notes on a staff, we can very quickly recognize some basic musical patterns emerging. By adjusting the type of scale we're using and how lenient our composers are with things like dissonance and tension, we can see (hear) random notes transform and rearrange themselves into simple melodies and harmonies. When we first start the machine running, we hear lots of dissonance and random notes that don't sound like music at all. The longer we let the machine run, the more consonant our sound is. The Composers eventually work all of the dissonance out of our piece of music and the music starts to stabilize and we hear less and less change as time goes on. The MFM states that are interesting to listen to and don't sound like garbage are somewhere in the middle.