Originally Posted By: MusicStudent
Scaler comes in at the mark shown. Yes, this is one of those "performance " things which play over my chords.

Thanks, that's what I was looking for. There are many, many words and videos explaining what Scaler can do, I'm wondering what I can do with it.

Originally Posted By: MusicStudent
I do understand your point about losing one's soul to software which writes the music for you.

OK, I was just kidding about losing your soul.

There are certainly concerns to be had about the effects of this stuff on creativity, but I don't go in for the idea that there's some mystical force inside us that we must protect and nurture by only getting ideas from organic sources.

I'm actually a big fan of automation and algorithmic composition as sources of musical material, and have no qualms about that. I even use pitch recognition on raw noise to generate MIDI output that you may or may not want to call music; I generate some output, delete all the obvious crap, then work what's left into something that sounds good to me.

Here's one "workflow" that might horrify some:

1) Pick an algorithm, set some parameters, and let it generate an hour of music with 8 parts.
2) Listen for parts that sound good and discard the rest, yielding, say, 5 minutes of music in 4 parts.
3) Voice, arrange, edit.

(Of course, an hour of 8 monkeys jumping around on a rectangle of 4 pianos would probably also provide interesting material, and now I'm wondering if anyone has ever made music out of animals "playing" instruments like that. I absolutely guarantee if you take that hour-long recording, you will find interesting sections, structured by the physical ratios of their bodies and behaviors. Anyway!)

Originally Posted By: MusicStudent
Visit the Scaler forum. Join in the chats and review the videos. You say you already bought the software, so you should see what others are doing.

Already there, thanks. The occasional comments about BIAB are interesting and strangely familiar.

PS – Computer music, by the program Aural and me:

https://soundcloud.com/mark_hayes/cellular-automata

Aural gave me a pure, abstract MIDI, generated using algorithms I know nothing about, and I messed with it in Logic. It's a little long (10 minutes), but I tried to keep it interesting.

Scaler here I come.

Last edited by Mark Hayes; 01/03/22 11:56 AM.