1  About My Music

“Markovs of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” ~ M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

1.1 AlgoCompSynth

“AlgoCompSynth” is a word I made up to describe what it is that I want to do. It’s a compression of “algorithmic composition and digital sound synthesis.” That’s a pretty broad class of music; to narrow it down, the following are my main inspirations.

  • Iannis Xenakis’ Formalized Music (Xenakis 1992). Xenakis took the applied mathematics of his day, for example, operations research and game theory, and used these algorithms to create scores for conventional and electronic performers. He also invented a technique called “Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis”, which uses Markov processes to specify not just the score of a piece but the parameters of the sound waveforms (Hoffmann 1996; Brown 2005; Xenakis 1992).

  • Alternate tunings. Primary among these is William Sethares’ Tuning, Timbre Spectrum, Scale (Sethares 1998, 2013). Also influential: Wendy Carlos (Carlos 1987), Harry Partch (Partch 1979), Erv Wilson (Narushima 2019) and Nick Collins (Collins 2008, 2012).

  • Physical modeling synthesis. A comprehensive reference can be found at (Smith accessed 2023-10-21).

  • Spectral music. This is another advanced synthesis methodology; a recent reference is (Lazzarini 2021)

My current home for published music is on Bandcamp at https://algocompsynth.bandcamp.com/. I may move to Gumroad, which allows publishing a broader range of digital media artefacts than music and music videos.

1.2 Other AlgoCompSynth projects

  1. AlgoCompSynth-One: This is a platform for doing high-performance digital signal processing and musical AI on NVIDIA GPUs. I currently support Windows 11 WSL Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and NVIDIA Jetson JetPack 5.

    If I can make everything work I will be supporting native Windows 11. AlgoCompSynth-One is based on Mamba, and Mamba runs on Windows, so unless other dependencies can’t be found, it should be possible.

  2. eikosany: This is an R package for algorithmic composition with musical scales derived by Erv Wilson and students of his theories.

  3. consonaR: This is an R package to perform the computations described in Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (Sethares 2013). This is a superset of any such algorithms that will be deployed in CLAMS; only calculations that need to be performed during a performance need to be deployed in CLAMS.

There is a fairly large overlap in functionality between eikosany and consonaR. There’s a plan for refactoring the two, but that work is on hold until I get more of CLAMS done.