There are a couple of the segments that I really want to spend the time with in order to get them into a more finished state. The results so far have been surprisingly nice, if unconventional, and I’ve let them whirl away in the background while working with pleasure. My goal was something slightly less maddening - although I’m almost always open to more glitchy. And then I diversified the sounds.Īs I worked on the tracks, I was really thinking of some particularly maddening, but amusingly glitchy “on-hold music” that I had suffered through over the last couple of years trying to deal with insurance issues. That instrumentation kept the developing dynamics of the pieces easy to follow, until I was pretty happy with the results. I began by keeping the pianos, even as I recombined the midi tracks in various ways.

The track marked “Ⓖ” in the “draft tracks” below is from a set of loops assembled together, all with the same key, scale and tempo, which I then mixed and matched a bit recklessly as I tried to find my feet. I’ve been playing with the possibilities for a couple of days. The result is a simple, but generally well-matched set of midi patterns, which can then be arranged in various ways and voiced with whatever instruments are available. As the name suggests, the app generates short piano pieces, which can be tailored in various ways through the settings, and it can export midi files for the melody and accompaniment it concocts, as well as a pad file, suitable for arpeggiators, synth sounds, etc. In order to explore the possibilities more seriously - after some enlightening, but not terribly successful manipulations of material from my Wotja experiments - I decided to work with midi tracks generated in the Piano Motifs app. Quite a number of the one-minute pieces in the Thesis Recurring app, for example, somehow really manage to avoid feeling repetitive.

But I’ve also been struck by the real success of a number of projects that build music that feels long-form out of short, but relatively complex loops.

One way to explore those dynamics is through the extended development characteristic of generative processes. (December 11, 2021) - I’m obviously interested in the dynamics of large canvas / long-form audio composition. Hors du troupeau - “music for strange elevators” project notes:

James wotja