Uploaded April 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
I had this idea of making an alarm clock that composes a new "symphony" every morning. My current alarm clock features bird song but it is a rather short, looped, recording and after a while one hears the repetitions. I thought I'd make something that never repeats exactly instead and thus remains surprising (my theory was that this should catch and keep my attention and therefore wake me up faster). At the same time, it operates within some very strict constraints, causing it to remain in the same music style at all times. I was hoping to thus create something that "calls" me into action. The music at times moves in interesting ways, and to my disappointment in fact causes me to remain in bed longer than before, just to hear where it's going to. As far as the original intention of making an alarm clock goes, I think that qualifies as a complete failure! But it might work fine as background or concentration music.
The sounds this time are not produced by hardware synthesizers or a piano, but are generated with mathematical formulas in supercollider. A way to think of such formulas is to realize that sound is nothing more than "wobbly air". The "shape" and "speed" of the "wobbles" determine how our ears and brains interpret it as sound. The formulas basically calculate how to move the loudspeaker cones over time so as to make the surrounding air wobble in such a way that we perceive it as sound. If you look at it this way, it sounds extremely difficult, almost indistinguishable from magic - but luckily the required level of mathematics to pull this off in fact is rather modest and supercollider has many built-in building blocks to get us started. In addition to producing the sounds, the supercollider program also has to make a composition, i.e. start and stop the desired sounds over time. The "score" (i.e. supercollider program) for both generating the sounds and generating the composition can be found on sccode.org/1-5el.
The video you see is generative video from the youtube channel of Simon Detheridge (youtube.com/watch?v=jVD67pMdv9k) who compiled a top 256 of electric sheep videos: more information on electricsheep.org/. The supercollider program would keep on generating music "forever" if I didn't stop it, but to give you an idea I hereby present a 2 hour fragment - maybe useful for an extended meditation session :)
I had this idea of making an alarm clock that composes a new "symphony" every morning. My current alarm clock features bird song but it is a rather short, looped, recording and after a while one hears the repetitions. I thought I'd make something that never repeats exactly instead and thus remains surprising (my theory was that this should catch and keep my attention and therefore wake me up faster). At the same time, it operates within some very strict constraints, causing it to remain in the same music style at all times. I was hoping to thus create something that "calls" me into action. The music at times moves in interesting ways, and to my disappointment in fact causes me to remain in bed longer than before, just to hear where it's going to. As far as the original intention of making an alarm clock goes, I think that qualifies as a complete failure! But it might work fine as background or concentration music.
The sounds this time are not produced by hardware synthesizers or a piano, but are generated with mathematical formulas in supercollider. A way to think of such formulas is to realize that sound is nothing more than "wobbly air". The "shape" and "speed" of the "wobbles" determine how our ears and brains interpret it as sound. The formulas basically calculate how to move the loudspeaker cones over time so as to make the surrounding air wobble in such a way that we perceive it as sound. If you look at it this way, it sounds extremely difficult, almost indistinguishable from magic - but luckily the required level of mathematics to pull this off in fact is rather modest and supercollider has many built-in building blocks to get us started. In addition to producing the sounds, the supercollider program also has to make a composition, i.e. start and stop the desired sounds over time. The "score" (i.e. supercollider program) for both generating the sounds and generating the composition can be found on sccode.org/1-5el.
The video you see is generative video from the youtube channel of Simon Detheridge (youtube.com/watch?v=jVD67pMdv9k) who compiled a top 256 of electric sheep videos: more information on electricsheep.org/. The supercollider program would keep on generating music "forever" if I didn't stop it, but to give you an idea I hereby present a 2 hour fragment - maybe useful for an extended meditation session :)
![[Experimental] Blind date with a light organ](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vMuv63Xar9k/mqdefault.jpg "[Experimental] Blind date with a light organ
Im still without working digital piano... So Im posting a recent bootleg recording of an experimental piece I made. What we see and hear is a blind date with a light organ.(Oh... the irony.) The opportunity arose to write an experimental piece consisting of sounds and lights. I created and chose sounds, and I mapped the sounds to lights. Part of the challenge was that it was not known beforehand how the lamps were going to be ordered in the space, nor what they would look like in terms of size and color. Therefore the assignment was not only about creating sounds and triggering lights, but also a bit about trying to think of a kind of light choreography that could work with any ordering of lamps. This music is not to everyones taste obviously (nor is all my other music for that matter), but I think its worth listening to the end to see and hear how the atmosphere changes over the course of the piece. Im curious to learn from you in the comments what feelings you experienced during the piece (if any), and what feeling you were left with at the end. Did it manage to grab your attention at some point?")
