A conversation with a coworker the other day got me thinking about ways to make our “noodling” a reality. We were trying to come up with a way to generate random music (defined by octave, step, and duration), while maintaining harmonic relevance. (In other words, we want to create music, not noise.)
We decided we should start with the following propositions:
- limiting the tones to a pentatonic scale
- limiting the octave range to that audible to humans
- limiting the duration of tones to a maximum of one or two whole notes
Beyond that, the discussion turned to how to generate the random values. Since I have been reading about the history of Nonlinear Dynamics (chaos) lately, my first thought was, of course, to generate the values for octave, step and duration by using a set of non-linear equations. So, of course, the first choice would have to be the Lorenz “butterfly” equations .
So, the plan is to calculate the values, convert them to MIDI values and write them out to a file using Python. Since the outcome of the equations relies on the starting conditions (Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions – also called the “Butterfly Effect” ) we thought that we could use starting values such as the current Temperature, Barometric Pressure and Humidity, or perhaps Date, Time and processs number, or counting Buicks, Chevys and Fords in the parking lot. Pretty much any 3 starting numbers.