6/24/2023 0 Comments Rapidcomposer vs synfire![]() You had to be in one of those camps, certainly the college professors, looked down on the crass attempts of rock bands using machine generated music parts. There was also this 'proper computer generated music by colleges', Wendy Carlos, and then the the kids who heard the Who's first sequencing work on one of their albums. I found the "Shilllenger system of music" very interesting, but it was tvery technical, and I had a hard time grasping it and ultimately found this was not the vein of music I wanted to work in. In fact Berklee music at one point had a class or two making use of his research. At that point, the melodies were too robotic sounding. ![]() I kept it and studied it for months, and tried to emulate his work. I found one of Joseph Shillenger's books in a Boston Library. I even wrote a crude melodic generation program (in basic and Fortran). I also tried a couple of computer music generation programs that ran on a Mainframe that was 75 miles away in Amherst, MA. But one day I came up with this beautiful, delicate melody, that sounded like someone actually played it. It would take an hour or more to fill the sequencer, patchchord it to the proper modules. You had to do this for each note, and then again for each layer. It was a torturous affair, you would play one note on keyboard, toggle a switch, then advance sequencer to the next step. I also had access to the first EMS digital sequencer, and a custom built 4 x 128 steps by Bob Moog himself, for UMass, Boston. In the early 70's I used several analog modular sequencers with switching logic modules, (jump between 3 layers of a 16 stage sequencer and also a 3 X 8 sequencer, plus using Sample/Hold modules) (ARP 2500, 2600, MOOG and ARIES modular synthesizers). Generating melodies with machines is also something I am very interested in. I've done a lot of research in these directions already and am really looking forward to working on this again. If the user could code this style and purpose ia scripts, that would be perfect. I want generators that can learn from examples and imitate a particular style you feed them. It is difficult to make a generator that can adapt to ANY style and ANY purpose. Generators are specific to a particular style or purpose.Cognitone would probably be asked to provide a new generator every month or so. That's because the underlying mechanics are recognized by the listener. Generators tend to create patterns that, after some time of getting used to, all seem to sound the same.While that is ok for some electronic styles, it does not help much for all the other styles out there. Generators tend to create artificial, random-like, repetitive patterns that do not sound like music performed by a human player.I want to avoid the typical flaws and shortcomings of generators: The only reason generators are not yet implemented for Synfire is that I didn't yet find the final solution to make them better than anything else out there. I was always intrigued by the idea of generating music since the late 80's. I'll post a few examples, If anyone's interested. For my first experiments with algo music back in 1992, I used a very early predecessor of Synfire, named "GENERATOR".
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