Duskaz Wandilaz - Machine Art is on all common streaming services. Alternatively, here it is on Bandcamp:
Genuary
Machine Art was composed almost entirely during January 2021 while I was living in Romania. Under the coronavirus lockdown, I found myself in a small rural town with three people, three dogs, and three cats. I had no musical equipment apart from a laptop and a borrowed acoustic guitar. I found Genuary, a generative art prompt-game calling people to make and publish a piece of generative art every day, based on themes given. Most people posted visual art, but I decided to make sounds.
Generative music is that which is made partially by some stochastic (random) process, some algorithm, data source, or such, as well as partially by regular old human composition. Composing generative music involves composing music, and composing processes.
While the end result is a music album, truly the art (as with any generative art) is in the process which went into creating those sounds, as much as it is in the sounds themselves. I hope that the album stands alone - indeed, several people have enjoyed it without any further explanation - however in my opinion, the best way is with some insight into the processes. I hope that this page will go some way towards giving you that insight while you listen to Machine Art.
Most of Machine Art was made using Supercollider.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Triple Nested Loop
I took the letters of the three words, ‘triple’, ‘nested’, and ‘loop’, and made a triple nested loop out of them to produce a series of ‘words’ of three letters each: ‘tnl’, ‘tno’, ‘tno’, ‘tnp’, ‘tel’, ‘teo’, and so on. Then, I came up with some rather arbitrary algorithms to convert each letter into a musical note, and played them as a melody.
Around 100 lines of Supercollider. The sounds are a combination of sine and saw oscillators, with some filtering, filtered delay, and cubic nonlinearity.
Rule 30
“Rule 30 is an elementary cellular automaton introduced by Stephen Wolfram in 1983. Using Wolfram’s classification scheme, Rule 30 is a Class III rule, displaying aperiodic, chaotic behaviour.
This rule is of particular interest because it produces complex, seemingly random patterns from simple, well-defined rules. Because of this, Wolfram believes that Rule 30, and cellular automata in general, are the key to understanding how simple rules produce complex structures and behaviour in nature. For instance, a pattern resembling Rule 30 appears on the shell of the widespread cone snail species Conus textile.” [Wikipedia]
91 lines of Supercollider. Sine waves and funky feedback.
Human
An entirely human-composed two part harmony, played badly by algorithms. All composed rhythm is eliminated, as two synthetic ‘players’ step through the notes of the melody in a semi-random fashion, to the beat of a drum. Interestingly, the irregularity in the beat of the drum was not programmed in, but was a glitch due to my computer struggling to keep up. Sometimes that happens to me too. In the tradition of human music, we leave our mistakes in.
~270 lines of Supercollider. MIDI melody made in Reaper. Convolution reverb, field recordings of a big pipe, sines, saws, white noise, that sort of thing.
I applied the ‘crawler’ algorithm to the Star Wars theme, to bizarre effect.