Allow me to introduce the polyprimiad, a musical form anyone can use to produce works that are extremely long and continuously varied. The principle behind it would work nicely as the stuff of a conceptual artwork, but I’d hate to see it limited to that. I think it also has real aesthetic potential, even if…
A couple months ago, I introduced a piece of experimental music called Archivorithm Number One. I’ve continued to tinker with it in the meantime, and I’d now like to release a “second edition,” along with a fresh round of audio examples which I hope you’ll enjoy. Let’s kick things off with a twenty-six-minute medley. (See…
For my 78th Griffonage-Dot-Com post, I’ve written a piece of software that randomly taps the tens of thousands of old records digitized through the Great 78 Project as a sample library; layers, sequences, and loops the clips according to a set of chance-controlled rules; and then introduces some randomized harmonic filtering and percussion. The results…
There aren’t many songs out there about Labor Day, but even so, I have a clear favorite. Released in 1955 exclusively on a hard-to-find benefit LP for paraplegic civilians, this is a song so catchy—and so unintentionally humorous—that I can’t resist trying to rescue it from its present obscurity. So give it a listen and…
If you go searching for information about the history of the song “Happy Birthday to You,” you’ll quickly run into a tangled web of analyses and debates regarding its copyright status. Here’s a quick introduction to the facts as generally known. The tune, originally composed with the lyrics “Good-Morning To All” by sisters Jessica and…
