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russell.hanson ,, gmail comThe Sound of Architecture is a project aimed to design a series of algorithms and routines that transform pictures or data representations of architecture or street views into compelling music. In classical music there are many examples of composers traveling to different places and composing music based on these experiences. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt's "Années de pèlerinage" were composed during visits to Switzerland and Italy. In the Chemical Brother's music video "Star Guitar" directed by Michel Gondry the scenery out the window on a train ride between Nîmes and Valence, France is synced to the music. In this case the scenery is molded to the landscape of the music. The Sound of Architecture does the reverse and molds the music to the scenery, in part because music is so much easier to manipulate than mountains, hills, rivers, and cement. A band with notable influences in architecture is Einstürzende Neubauten a German avant-garde industrial music group whose name means "Collapsing New Buildings." Motifs in their music include collapse (album title "Kollaps"); the cityscape of Berlin (album title "Berlin Babylon"); and epistemology and blankness (album title "Tabula Rasa").
As a performance piece, the music is generated from the video directly, and can be exhibited in halls without the necessity of physically moving through different architectural environments or landscapes.
The Sound of Architecture involves designing and coding algorithms to turn architectural landscapes or pictures of architecture or street scenes into pieces of music. Essentially, every city or street has its own feel and given the remarkable ability of music to effect how people feel, this project aims to allow the music to reflect a particular environment, with particular emphasis on city architecture < The Sound of Architecture >
In computational linguistics "generative" models are used to develop parsers and other machine learning artifacts. Developing a generative model for a musical corpus would allow the "grammar" of the music to be determined, and subsequently reproduced in a similar and related form < "A Generative Model for Music" >
Music Automaton < MusicAutomaton > < MusicAutomaton.com > is a musical project whereby existing pieces of music are analyzed by an algorithm to determine the statistical signatures of the melodies, key changes, etc. of a piece of music, usually from a MIDI file. Subsequently, a Monte Carlo randomization algorithm takes these statistical signatures and via a clever scheme produces new music with the same tonal and key characteristics of the original. This was originally developed for classical guitar music. Clearly, there are many rules to different styles of music (fugue, chorale, swing) but each can be clearly identified by the astute listener, by what we posit are principally statistical signatures.
It is a fugueomatic!! < Fugueomatic >