{"id":2055,"date":"2016-08-04T00:34:55","date_gmt":"2016-08-04T04:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=2055"},"modified":"2016-08-04T00:34:55","modified_gmt":"2016-08-04T04:34:55","slug":"more-new-music-and-what-happened-to-the-melody-generator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=2055","title":{"rendered":"More new music and what happened to the melody generator"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I uploaded a new piece of music to YouTube earlier today called <em>The Stormbringer&#8217;s Apprentice<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QpwhqQFiHMw\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I write in the description:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This piece provides the themes for a villain called Stormov, from my book <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Insane-Fantasy-Sean-Patrick-Hannifin-ebook\/dp\/B01I2KDK1U\/\">Insane Fantasy<\/a>. He&#8217;s an apprentice for the mysterious &#8220;Stormbringer&#8221;, and helps to entice new recruits for his master&#8217;s evil plans. His themes are mostly dark, but there is a hint of adventure in there as well, as he lures potential helpers with temptations of worldly power.<\/p>\n<p>Also, this is my first video to feature my own attempt at programming my own custom &#8220;music animation machine&#8221; programmed in Java with jMonkeyEngine. The frame rate is not as smooth as I&#8217;d like it to be (I&#8217;m still screen-capturing it), but it&#8217;s not horrible at least. Anyway, I think I&#8217;ll enjoy playing around with it. Obviously it&#8217;s inspired by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/smalin\">Stephen Malinowski&#8217;s work<\/a>, as I&#8217;ve been using his decade-old &#8220;Music Animation Machine&#8221; program for a long time now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As mentioned above, this piece is animated with my own custom &#8220;music animation machine.&#8221; I may release the source code for it at some point for anyone who&#8217;s interested in it, but you&#8217;d have to download <a href=\"http:\/\/jmonkeyengine.org\/\">jMonkeyEngine<\/a> to compile it and run it yourself; I&#8217;m not really interested in making into a standalone program right now, as I hope to continue fooling around with the code. The code is also sloppy and contains features I never finished programming, as it&#8217;s all part of an ongoing MIDI sequencer project. Also, it doesn&#8217;t actually even <em>play<\/em> MIDI files&#8230; it only makes the shapes and animations based on a MIDI file, which is all I need it to do as I sync videos with tracks recorded from Overture in Windows Movie Maker before adding titles and uploading to YouTube.<\/p>\n<p>In case you missed it, last week I posted this track called <em>Storybook Overture<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_4oRP6sY70c\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>So that makes five tracks completed so for my upcoming album (which I have no idea what I&#8217;ll name yet): Lullaby of the Westwind Woods, The Storm Cometh, A Stargazer&#8217;s Lullaby, Storybook Overture, and The Stormbringer&#8217;s Apprentice. Together they amount to over 20 minutes, so I&#8217;m over 1\/3rd finished the album!<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>In other news, I&#8217;ve had several people email me over the last few months asking about whatever happened to the <strong>melody generator<\/strong>. Well, I was contacted by a shady underground group that secretly controls the world, and they warned me that the world simply is not ready for something so powerful.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, the project just got to be too frustrating. It was getting enough interest that people were thirsty to learn how it worked, yet not enough interest to fund a Kickstarter, and I just didn&#8217;t (and don&#8217;t) have the time to give it the attention it needs. I of course haven&#8217;t given up on it, but it&#8217;s on the back-burner for now until I can get my life sorted a bit more. In the meantime, I&#8217;d just rather spend my free time writing music and books and programming games, as those projects tend to actually generate some income. Not much, but something. So I have absolutely no idea when I&#8217;ll be able to get back to working on the melody generator. Could be later this year, could be two or three years down the road.<\/p>\n<p>I have an email list here if you&#8217;d like to be updated when I actually return to the project: <a href=\"https:\/\/forms.aweber.com\/form\/33\/1832647133.htm\">Melody Generator News<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I uploaded a new piece of music to YouTube earlier today called The Stormbringer&#8217;s Apprentice: I write in the description: This piece provides the themes for a villain called Stormov, from my book Insane Fantasy. He&#8217;s an apprentice for the mysterious &#8220;Stormbringer&#8221;, and helps to entice new recruits for his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[203,23],"tags":[100,740,739],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-x9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2055"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2055"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2057,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2055\/revisions\/2057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}