Music For Shuffle, Sketch #10 by Matthew Irvine Brown
In the video above, each blue column represents an instrument, and each block in a column represents an individual phrase. When one phrase finishes playing, it randomly cues up and plays another one. This is kind of like having five or six separate copies of iTunes, each playing independently – one on drums, another one bass, another one on chords, and so on – and all of them playing on shuffle, independent of one another. It’s a brilliant head-melter to try and write simple harmony for. Also, I can now trigger images in sync, in the other windows there. Been messing around trying to think about how live notation might work.
Adaptive/recursive design
This is a more flexible way to compose, listen to, and maybe perform this stuff, but I want to keep sharing sketches with my friends, and don’t want to force anyone to have to run a custom Max patch just to listen to some crappy demo. So, the shuffleable MP3s of this sketch are stamped with the specific time when I recorded them playing on the fancier software-based setup. (via Music For Shuffle Sketch #10) Click through to download the shuffleable MP3s.