A Quick Off-Topic NoteI spent the passed week in Boston visiting MIT (for those who aren't sure what that is, it's the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, widely known as the best engineering/mathematics university in the world, check it out at mit.edu). It was everything I expected and more...I'm simply in love with it. I met with many people there, including a professor of computer science and contributor to the field of cryptography working closely with the National Security Agency, a physics graduate student helping design a massive laser to detect and prove the existence of gravitational waves as postulated by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, a famous composer and opera writer, and a programmer responsible for an innovative music composition tool. What a week. Now the only problem: 10% admissions rate. Ouch. Wish me luck.
ReflectionI actually did a lot this week. I took my laptop with me to Boston and worked on the program every night. I finished a progression module that works based on the interval observations I posted in my blog a few days ago. It turned out quite nicely, and I'm continuing to refine it.
By far the most productive thing I did this week, however, was meet with
Tod Machover (or
here), a well-known composer, opera writer, digital composition innovator, and just about everything else you can imagine. After getting over my initial feeling of awe when I met him, I managed to talk with him for a good while and told him about my project. He was genuinely interested and gave me some suggestions but overall seemed to think I was heading down a very promising path. He also introduced me to Peter Torpey, one of the programmers that helped make the Hyperscore software a reality. Peter also took a great interest in my project after I explained it in a fair amount of detail to him. He told me to keep in touch and let him know how the project goes. So I may have found some BETA-testers for my project! (That's a technical term for the people that test a software before it gets released) Peter also told me that a modularized structure (like the one I currently have built in my program) is definitely the way to go. He also said creative interfaces are important for making things intuitive to the public.
Goals- Render a music sample
Obviously this is a recurring goal for me. I have yet to achieve it, just because I don't want the first music sample to be embarrassingly bad. I know it won't be great, but I want it to at least sound somewhat like music. I think I'm getting pretty darn close to achieving this goal.
- Read more of Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy
This is an important part of my research. I'm doing heavy note taking and annotating on this book.
- Organize everything into Noodlenotes
In order to prepare for my research portfolio, I'll need to organize what I have into NoodeNotes. I should also start printing screen captures of the program's interface so that I can visually prove some of the work I've been doing. Ideally I could even have a sound clip as part of my portfolio.
- Expand the progression data structure
This is a pretty specific goal. Right now the progression data structure stores everything in terms of which notes will play and how long they will play. I should at least separate the chord from the bass note so that I can have interesting splits between bass and treble.
- Add capabilities for post-processing
I need to make the program capable of running post-processing modules after it finishes running generative modules. An example of a plugin that would fall under this category would be one that applies a swing groove to the piece, or perhaps various playing styles. This is done after the actual notes of the piece have been generated.
