Computers as musical instruments
To create a sequence of tones in advance, to compose, is just one of the numerous possibilities to create music and usually only musically educated people achieve good results that way. There is a similarity to the creation of attractive images. My question is, if and how people with less musical and artistic knowledge can be supported to generate good auditive and visual results using a computer. Many fields of music are based on mathematical concepts. Is there a way to leave this mathematical part of composing music to the computer and thus support the user to focus her forces on the intuitive part of the job? And how?
Complexity and intuition
The cheapest solution to make sure that fairly harmonic results emerge from the use of a computer is probably to allow the user only to recombine pregenerated sequences of tones. However this heavily restricted opportunity of interaction will likely result in frustrating the user and the results are bound to be very limited and foreseeable in their variations, thus boring.
An alternative way of creating conditions under which every user might create "good" or "nice sounding" results in the sense of the author of such an environment is to limit only the number of tones used to a certain harmonic choice and to preserve a wide field of variation. Maybe you don't provide people with the full chromatic scale but only with the sounds of one particular key or certain harmonic intervals. This way there still remains enough room to move for the user to create individual results without feeling restricted.
But even the free, awkward, maybe dissonant play of an instrument may sound "beautiful" under certain circumstances as long as it is embedded in an appropriate context and thus creates tempting accents and contrasts. Music which is all too "harmonic" might even sound uninteresting. But of course the main aim of computer software can not be to create "perfect" or always good sounding results. This enterprise would be doomed to failure due to missing objective criterions. The core idea is to support the composer or performer where a computer is capable of doing so.
First try
SYNCHRON is a tentative effort in this direction. The transformation of single elements of music like rhythms or harmonies in interactive applications are examined.
Images
