In the process of practicing some more programming that's for the sole purpose of learning and having fun, I decided to generate music (or noise, yet to be [wrong]seen[/wrong][correct]heard[/correct]).
I have had some luck with this kind of thing before:
http://xentrics.net/demo
This demo is completely procedural. The most interesting part, in my opinion, is the sound.
It's explained to a little degree here:
http://mskafi.blogspot.com/2010/02/dynamic-sound-in-actionscript.html
The plan is to create a program that can generate WAV files (or any other convenient uncompressed sound format) and save them into file.
The next step would be to distribute those generated files for feedback from people, and in the process evolve the algorithms, automatically, to generate more appealing music.
This is not an original idea. It's even popular among leading composers to rely on fractals, grammars, stochastic modeling, evolutionary models, to compose musics.
A little bit of background for the clueless:
- Our program will be a single executable, given a set of inputs, will generate a waveform that is audible.
- The output file will be large, but highly compressible.
- We will need to organize these waveforms in a format "understandable" by popular players. I am thinking of using the windows audio wave format (WAV for wave in short). The specs should be littered all over the internet.
By participating (warning, marketing like)
- You will be able to "hear" different sine and cosine waves.
- You will be able to randomly try different schemes for the generation of sounds, and test their aethetic feel.
- Build some knowledge in a weird area of programming (I love to call it a dark art, beeps and whistles)
- Experience what it sounds like to be attacked by a hive of bees from all sides while running at half the speed of sound in a hallway. All from the comfort of your armchair.
I will be waiting for participation. Come in masses please. Do it.