2
24
24
-5
-5
.96
12000
.05
5.928

Cloud Music No. 4

Michael Gogins
October 2022

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This is an online piece of electroacoustic music, rendered in your Web browser using high-resolution audio. It will play indefinitely, never ending, always changing.

This piece is generated as a sort of musical dynamical system operating in chord space. Generated notes are sent to Csound for rendering in real time. The synthesized audio is then sampled (using a WebAudio Analyzer) to generate a sine-wave visualization of the music, using code adapted from Sound Sinus Wave by Eitraz.

The notes are played by a Csound orchestra that is embedded in this Web page using my WebAssembly build of Csound. This in turn includes my CsoundAC library for algorithmic composition.

Feel free to use this piece as a template for creating new pieces of this type... as long as it doesn't sound too much like this one!

Please report any problems you have playing this piece, or any ideas for enhancements, at cloud-music issues.

Credits

The StrangeAttractor class in CsoundAC, which computes the 4-dimensional orbit of a system of 4 coupled ordinary differential equations, uses code inspired by Julien C. Sprott's book Strange Attractors. The state of the system is mapped to indices of set-type, inversion, pitch-class transposition, and octavewise revoicing. In short, the chaotic orbit of this system becomes an unceasing flow of chord progressions.

My code in CsoundAC for working with chords, scales, and voice-leading implements basic ideas from Dmitri Tymoczko's work in music theory.

Code for compiling and controlling shaders is adapted from ShaderToy.com.

The algorithm for downsampling the video canvas is from Sveinn Steinarsson's MS thesis with code from https://github.com/pingec/downsample-lttb.

Csound instruments are directly copied with minor alterations from Joseph T. Kung's Csound piece Xanadu.