My Kickstarter for a book on melody has launched! Check it out!
It will run for 3 weeks, until October 14th.
Whatever else
Trying a Kickstarter sometime soon…
I’ve been in a bleak creative rut lately. I feel like doing nothing creative at all. I’ve had no inspiration, interest, or will to do anything. Go to work, come home, eat, and waste time watching movies and surfing the web. A dull, boring, purposeless, vacuous existence.
So in an effort to give myself a bit of purpose, I’ve been working on putting together a Kickstarter campaign called “Give me some money to smile again.”
OK, it’s not called that… it’s actually fundraising for that book on melody that I’ve been writing on and off for years. The Secrets of Melody. It details my theory of melody, including how my melody generators work. Basically, if I can raise the funds, I can finish it by March 2016. Of course, I have hardly any online following, so I know it’s a long shot. Seems worth a try though, especially as I feel no great desire to do much else at the moment.
And if I fail to raise the funds, I’m going to go ahead buy an Oculus Rift dev kit and start having some fun with it to make myself feel better. So it’s a win-win for me. And I might buy one regardless because I’ve been dreaming of VR and I’ve got some fun ideas for projects I’d like to try with it. But if there’s enough interest for my book on melody, I’d love to make that a priority.
Anyway, I just have to make the Kickstarter video, which is hard because I’m the self-conscious type who hates looking at a video of himself. But I’ll try anyway.
So look out for that sometime this week.
Whatever else
February happenings…
Haven’t gotten much done this week. I’m adjusting to a slightly new work schedule with a bit more hours (which is good for the paycheck), plus some chest congestion has been keeping me from getting to sleep, and I keep waking up with headaches. So I haven’t been very good at finding large chunks of time to do any very focused work.
Anyway, I’ve been a bit torn lately between competing interests: should I work on my fiction writing, or my music software? Whenever I commit to one, I feel the pull of the other. Ultimately, though, I think I’m going to focus on programming my music software for a while. I’m excited about its potential, plus it would be awesome if I could turn it into a business and be self-employed with it. Not that I’m not arrogant enough to believe I could do the same with writing with more work and patience, but music software that’s like nothing else on the market (as far as I know) probably stands a better chance.
Whatever else
There’s too much stuff I want to do…
I recently finished a few weeks of freelance programming, creating some custom software that allows the client to quickly format / generate bid documents for a demolition company. It’s nice to finish something that’s actually productive, something I haven’t done much of this year…
Anyway, I’m now back to having a bunch of free time and a continuing burning desire to not have to get a real job that will steal it all away again (even though I’m really broke). I have a lot of projects I’d like work on, including:
- Finish writing that book on melodies that I’ve been planning for years
- Write a fantasy series and indie-publish it on Amazon Kindle, Smashwords, etc.
- Write more music and put together another album
- Write and draw a web comic based on that cartoon series I created back in 2012
- Write fairy tales — I’ve been wanting to write short weekly fairy tales, just for fun
- Do something with computer game programming — I have a short mystery game I planned out a year ago that I still haven’t done anything with. I’d like to learn how to use Unity or something, create some pixel art, and actually try to make it
Of course, the problem is that making any sustainable revenue from any of these areas of interest takes time… too much time. So much time that a sane person would get a real job in the mean time.
But I really don’t want to have to be sane.
The other problem is that it’s hard to have focus when there’s so much you want to do, but lack of focus is the bane of progress.
But I do want to be more disciplined, which includes setting and following deadlines, something I’ve never been very good at, especially with more creative-oriented projects like writing. But… I have to.
I’m not sure how this is going to work out, but here’s my current plan: My book on my theory of melody will be my top priority. I’m setting the deadline of having an eBook version of it available on Amazon Kindle by November 25th (my birthday). Meanwhile, I’ll set smaller piecemeal deadlines and goals for the other projects each week. I’ll see if that will help me accomplish anything, or if I’ll need even more focus than that to make progress.
I’ll probably also try to blog more, because I think blathering about updates on my progress helps me actually make some progress because it gives me something to blog about. Weird circular psychology, but it works, like making a to-do list and crossing things off…
Oh, and I’ve still got some co-authoring projects going on, which are exciting, so they will be stealing away time as well.
Anyway, for the remainder of this week, my goals will be to:
- Plan the “book on melody”, breaking down the project into smaller chunks that can be given deadlines of their own
- Finish plotting that fantasy book I’m working on called “Stormground”
- Co-authoring stuff
I’d also like to try to use some of the money I made from that freelance programming gig to buy a new set of headphones. I haven’t had a good pair of headphones to compose music with for over a year now (maybe even two years… or three… it’s been a while). I usually use wireless headphones, but they’re not very good for composing because they make automatic volume adjustments, keeping things from being too soft or too loud. Which is great when you’re watching a movie or just listening to music, but it’s terrible when you’re actually trying to compose it. Plus, wireless headphones always have that faint white noise in the background, which is very annoying when you’re trying to hyper-focus on sound. And my other headphones have pretty much worn out, or were cheap and terrible to begin with. So: must buy new headphones. Especially since composing some new music will be necessary to help advertise the melody book, and I want to start building interest for it as soon as possible.
Whatever else
Projects for June 2014
I haven’t blogged in a while, so here’s a little update of what I’m working on.
Writing fiction
I’m still working on co-authoring two short stories. We’re almost done with one. It’s taken us a lot longer than expected, but I always find interesting the seemingly random issues we find we have different perspectives on and end up discussing for hours. Maybe that’s not very productive writing-wise, but I actually really enjoy it; even if I don’t necessarily change my mind all the time, it forces me to think about things differently.
I’m still querying agents for my novel, Son of a Dark Wizard. I have yet to start another solo writing project, though I have a few stories in various phases of plotting. What I’m hoping to do with my next novel, whenever I start writing it, is to put it online for free, a bit like I did with The Game of Gynwig years ago, and then self-publish it. I even spent a week creating a custom WordPress theme and website to host the project at Morrowgrand, which will hopefully host other future projects as well so they’ll all cross-advertise each other. (Speaking of WordPress themes, the theme for this blog really needs to be updated at some point, doesn’t it?) In addition to posting the blog online, I actually think it would be interesting to record (with screen-capture software) my entire writing process of the novel. I know I’m not the first to try that, but it seems like a fun idea. (Although I guess if I do that, I won’t be able to write long-hand, as I do roughly half the time.)
On top of writing and releasing the novel, I also hope to write a musical soundtrack for it.
That said, any solo-writing projects may take a back seat to my other projects:
Melody project stuff
I’m finally returning to my book on composing melodies that I’ve been trying to write on and off for years. I think I’ve finally found an interesting angle to take with the book. I was struggling because my attempts were coming off as really academic and bland. Finally I thought: why not treat it like Johann Fux’s Study of Counterpoint
The other project is the real Parnassus: the symphony generator. A piece of software that uses the algorithms of my melody generators to help automate the entire composition process. The idea is that the symphony generator would be able to compose entire symphonies on its own, automatically, with the composer providing as much or as little creative input as he wishes. My two main goals for it, that I’ve been daydreaming about for over a decade: 1) I want it to be able to compose a Mozartean symphony at the touch of a button (or maybe a few buttons, if I must compromise), and 2) I want to be able to give it only a melody, and have it flesh it out into a full piece with little or no input from me. Obviously I want it to be able to do more than that, but those are my main two objectives.
I’d like to get them both out by December, in time for the holiday season (and before I go completely bankrupt), but almost everything I do takes me longer than I expect (except for going bankrupt).
Updates
I never did write that screenplay last month. I just found I was more interested in whatever else I was working on at the time. Maybe next year.
And that Nickelodeon cartoon pitch a few months back never went anywhere, unfortunately. That is, Nickelodeon wasn’t interested. I still want to do something with my pitch material at some point (though probably no time soon), but I’m not sure what.
Music Writing
That book on melody…
I started writing a book on melody back in 2008, I think it was. Maybe even a bit before then. But then I got sidetracked programming melody generators, namely my Android app and my online version. I learned quite a lot from these endeavors, so I’m glad I spent time with them before continuing my book; it made for fantastic research. I still plan on creating a desktop version of the melody generator, but there’s a lot of interface programming to learn. I really hate interface programming!
In the meantime, I’m returning to writing that book on melody. I’m starting it from scratch, though I have plenty of notes to work from that I made while programming the melody generators, so I have almost all the content I need. It’s just a matter of sorting it out and presenting it in an easy-to-follow way.
For now, I aim on having it done by the Fourth of July, and then releasing it as soon as I can after that. It will most likely be a self-published ebook, though I’m not yet sure how I’ll sell it. I’ll worry about that later.
And now I better turn off my computer… big storm above…
Computer music Music composition Websites
Melody Generator web version
The web version of my automatic Melody Generator is now up at melodygenerator.com. I consider it still in “beta.” I’ve spent the last few days creating and finalizing the site’s design in a short burst of obsession. If you’re a bored musician looking to grow your collection of melodies, check it out!
Computer music
Computer generated sea chanteys!
How often have you been sitting there thinking: “Oh my gosh! I wish I had some new sea chantey melodies to play on an instrument and/or write lyrics to!” Probably more times than you care to count, eh?
Well, fear no more! The sea chantey melody generator is finally here! That’s right; in less than a second, the sea chantey melody generator will generate hundreds of sea chantey melodies for you, filled with those catchy memorable sea chantey melody patterns.
Here is a sample of 100 sea chantey melodies as generated by the generator. Feel free to write lyrics for them and add them to your collection of sea chantey goodness.
The sea chantey melody generator is available for just 5 easy payments of $50,000.
Seriously, though, I’ve been working on getting my melody generator to compose in “styles” and sea-chantey-style was my first experiment. I look forward to trying some other styles. As usual, the melody generator is restricted to 8-bar melodies in 4/4 time, a restriction I still haven’t programmed my way out of, but trying to get the generator to work with styles has been a more interesting endeavor recently.
Computer music
Web-based melody generator examples…
I still have a lot of work to do on this thing, but I mainly wanted to show that my melody generation algorithm now works fast enough to make this web-based version possible:
Programming
Melody Generator for the web progress…
Finally fixed this blog’s recent comment-spam problem by adding a CAPTCHA plugin. Duh. Why didn’t I think of that before?
Anyway, my Melody Generator for the web is slowly coming along. It mainly consists of two pages. First, the "Compose Melody" page:
Above you can see all the functionality the melody generator should have. Right now, none of those options actually work, except for the “Melody name” field and the “Compose melody” button. The rest still needs to be programmed, which is what I’ll be working on for the next few weeks or so. After you hit the “Compose melody” button, the melody plays as a MIDI file at the top. If you like the melody, you can download it right away, or you can save it to your Library.
And that’s the second page, “My Library”:
The library section should be pretty self-explanatory; you can go through your list of saved melodies and download them, play them, or delete them. You’re allowed to save up to 5,000 melodies, though if you actually compose that many, you are probably somewhat insane.
After I finish programming the functionality for the melody generation options, I’ll have to program some user-settings (such as the ability to change your password). Not sure how long it’ll take, but I’ll keep the blog updated. Maybe.