I had a long conversation this morning with Ed Summers about making bots, why we make bots, and the ways bots (and bot making) might provide insight into other aspects of being digitally literate. I also have thoughts on how this intersects with archaeological knowledge making, more on which another day.

For now: I came across this short piece by Joe Zach where he uses tracery to generate a sequence of chords (the names of chords) which he then feeds into another library, scribbletune to write those chords to a midi file.

HOW AWESOME IS THAT!

And so, as part of my continuing exploration of generative sound art, I forked his code and added a bit to generate a melody line to go along with the chords. My version writes three different midi files, which I then combine in Garageband (and what the hell, I added a bongo sample because it’s spring and it’s snowing, and I’d like to imagine I’m somewhere sunny).

Give it a listen: https://soundcloud.com/shawn-graham-60451318/sand

I’m thinking that this could be plumbed into a twitter bot somehow, write the midi overtop of an autoplaying video…? I dunno.

(oh, and I also indulged in my imposter syndrome re music, generative art, etc, by sonifying an article about imposter syndrome through substitution of letters for number values, A = 1, etc, and then doing a modulo operation to map the resulting numbers to the 88 key keyboard. It’s a bit on the creepy side. https://soundcloud.com/shawn-graham-60451318/imposter-syndrome )