I was thinking about ways of generating music mathematically last night. I’ve had this idea for a while of making a compositional tool that works something like the old Kai’s Power Tools Texture Explorer did. You could generate a sequence of notes, then mutate the rhythm, melody, and harmony over time using genetic algorithms to approximate what the user wants. Anyway, the issue that occurred to me was that we usually do our math in base-10 but music generally uses either one of the common 7 tone scales such as the diatonic or the 12 tone chromatic scale. One possibility is to work in a 10 tone microtonal scale but a lot of people wouldn’t find the sound very pleasing (microtonal scales usually have more tones than the chromatic scale anyhow). The other option, of course, is to let the user pick the scale and do the math in an appropriate base for the scale. It sounds like fun but I probably won’t have the time to do it anytime soon as it’s not the sort of project someone is likely to pay me for! Oh well.

Speaking paying work, I’ve been working on a new web site that’s going to be using mod_virgule and have been making loads of changes to the code. Some bug fixes and some new features. Raph‘s been way too busy lately to do much maintenance on the official release, so I’ve decided to release my patched version for anyone who’d like to have a look at it. Once the official version starts seeing active development again, my version will probably mutate back towards the main source tree and go away.