One of the challenges of listening to generative music, particularly of the ambient variety, is that change is fairly constant, but also often infinitesimal, so it is difficult to come away with any clear sense of the musical journey you have been on. The result of all this will be twenty hours of music that is all recognizably connected, developing along lines established by the rules set up for “Positive teal,” but presumably also diverse enough, particularly when the recordings are shuffled together, to periodically underline the developments, chance elements and divergences present. I’m still learning how long Wotja will continue to generate music on various devices - and hope to draw the recording for these mixes from as deep into the process as the software will allow. My initial thought is that it will take the form of four hour-long mixes. The second relay will begin with the first segment of the second instance, while the third relay will begin with the first of the third and the fourth with the first of the fourth.Ī fifth relay will mix the “late” recordings from each instance, with the lack of “matching” adding some additional randomness to the exercise. The sixteen hours of “matched” recordings will be split up into twelve-minute segments and then rearranged, so that the first segment of the first instance leads into the second segment of the second, then to the third of the third and the fourth of the fourth, finally cycling back to the fifth segment of the first and completing an hour-long “relay” - or perhaps, to misuse the metaphor a bit, a “leg,” as the four resulting compositions will each consist of four hours, twenty tracks, continuing the pattern until the first relay ends with the twentieth segment of the fourth instance. (The logistics get complicated anyway as the process drags on.) I’m also trying to record at least one hour from each instance when the mix has had much more time to mutate - after the eighth hour, with less care given to matching up the times. Wotja lacks a pause button, but the very slow development of the pieces means that the lost bars are unlikely to be missed. The idea for the relays has been to record four roughly continuous hours of audio for each of four instances, an hour at a time, with a few bars lost here and there in the process of stopping and restarting the recording process. In this case, I did less tinkering with the choice of instruments than I have in other experiments, turning my attention to the composition rules and fine-tuning the expression of the instruments until I had something I could happily listen to for the hours that would be necessary - as many as twelve and a half so far for a single instance of the mix. The Wotja mix, “Positive teal,” consists of a complex lead tracks featuring fairly generic synths and a bit of bass, plus three more tracks of pretty, but not particularly distinctive synthesizer ambience. So, in order to explore the extent and character of that development it has made sense to allow the development to continue hour after hour, but also to record multiple instances of a “single” composition at similar lengths, both as audio files and as midi files. But because the software introduces gradual and partially random development into the composition as it unfolds, the sameness is relative - particularly as that development is allowed to continue. All of the various tracks that will make up relays & reconstructions are instances of a single composition assembled in Wotja, the generative music software I’ve been using on most of the hors du troupeau tracks. (November 11) - The song remains the same - more or less.
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