I’m tired. My sleep schedule is just terrible. That holiday weekend wasn’t good for me.
I don’t have much to say right now anyway. I’m not sure I’ll have my first album ready by August anymore; my interests have once again shifted to something else. Over the past week, I’ve been working on my melody project again, something I started quite a few months ago (August 2008), but it’s just been sitting there for a while. I made some minor improvements to the algorithm (to be more specific, I took the recursive inverse directional beta loops and strongly conjoined them with the dysfunctional relative note sequence data curves coupled with reticulating splines, and programmed in the consciousness of a monkey. (More seriously, I changed the algorithm so that the output melody would be guaranteed to not be any of the input melodies, which had been a threat in the previous version if you were mixing only a few melodies that didn’t sound very much alike. With the modified algorithm, the program forces the melodies you’re using to mix. Overall, I think it gives better results, but it depends on the melodies you input and how similar they already sound (and your own melodic tastes, of course).)), and I also made this spiffy javascript page which aids in the formatting of the text files the program uses as input.
What I’d like to do this summer is release the melody project in it’s current form so that others can fool around with it. I’m hoping to turn it into a Java applet that will run on a web page. It shouldn’t be too hard; it’s already Java after all. I mainly need to program a good input-output system, since it can’t so easily load and save text files from a visitor’s computer, since it will be on a web page. I can load the text files from my server easily enough, then I suppose the output could just be text in a text box. That would be the easiest, and will probably be what I end up doing to start off with. But that is a pretty annoying burden for the site visitors; they’ll have to interpret the output text by themselves (it’s not really hard, it’s just extra labor). So I’ll have to program a text-to-MIDI converter so visitors can easily and quickly hear what the output melodies sound like. And then there are a thousand other improvements I could blather on and on about, but those are my first ambitions.
So that’s what I’ve been working on…
Oh, and remember to vote for a note! (That whole experiment is going to take forever…)
Anyway, hopefully you won’t mind it if I just blather a bit on what I’ve been working on. I started out writing a book on melody, though I didn’t get much writing done at all; I mostly just planned out how I was going to analyze melodies. Then I started writing a computer program that could be fed melody information and spit out an “analysis” of that melody (“analysis” being mostly a collection of statistics). It was my intention to use these statistics in my book, but then I decided to try reversing the process. So I made my program take a melodic analysis and create a melody for it. That in and of itself isn’t special, it just gives you back the original melody you put in. But if you change that analysis around a bit, based on similarities of other melodic analyses (and some randomness), you get … new melodies! Or at least melodies that are variations of the original melodies. In other words, the more similar two melodies are, the easier they will mix. The more different they are, the more my program will just regurgitate one of them, after having been unable to mix them that well.