Want to hear winchimes but live in an area with no wind?
Want to hear music but sick of tonal chord proggressions?
Want to hear some sinewaves?
WANT TO LONGER!
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or is it...
The Colleidoscope! On a Collision course to COLLIDERTOWN! Now with collidervision and sound, in 1.1 mono (and with no visual). Prepare to be collided... the oldschool way.
In the beggining people were just colliding by hand. It was a slow, tedious process that led to much frustration and wasted energy. Then, somebody had the idea of making colliding a digital process and invented Collider, a sequence of digital processes that synthesizes colliding inside the computer! Collider made an impact, as expected, and its owner Bill Tocollide became a billionare within hours of its release. But something was wrong... while the program was colliding, it was not SUPER colliding. This problem was addressed in 1987 when Sony, Microsoft and BMW (SMB for short) joined forces in an effort to create the next logical step in Collider's evolution. With plently of resources and the leading scientists at NASA leading the charge, Super Collider 1 was finally released. To say it made an impact on the music world would be like saying John Cage was only a "pretty cool" guy. The shockwave experienced after its release changed music forever, like Cage changed his clothes every day. And boy, were they some clothes...
SMB enjoyed the financial compensation for this epic discovery, but the tensions between segments within the company grew. Those more interested in music and the entertaining power of Supercollider wanted to build a collider that could not only collide, but be enjoyed by the whole family in 3d graphics plugged into a TV. They wanted to release "Colliding station". The programers in the company wanted to release "Collider '95", a Colliding program that would come with every new computer and feature a free internet browser, "Collide Arouser". The third section of SMB wanted to make high quality European cars instead. So the company split appart, into Sony (who went on to create the Playstation based on its colliding concepts), Microsoft (who created Windows 95 and Internet Explorer as a way to share colliding projects with other enthusiasts around the globe) and BMW, who went on to make European cars.
The company that took over was Machintosh, a contaminated apple company somewhere in France. Machintosh wanted a collider that could not only Supercollide, but Supercollide 2. After many failed attempts Super Collider 2 was finally released.
Its welcome was as expected, and even cinemas sold out their special "SuperCollider 2" 3 hour previews. In 1991 an enthusiastic John Cage got hold of the SuperCollider 2 concepts, and, in an effort to mix the new, digital Supercollider 2 with original analogue concepts of colliding by hand, created Supercollider 3. The new collider offered unprecedented sound quality, and due to its construction could make sinewaves as pure as John Cage's concepts. It also included a random function.
Supercolider 3 is often taught in musical institutions as an alternative to colliding by hand, or composing real music.
It is with this program that I made the following piece:
http://www.box.net/shared/c4si2hu49v
The work uses 4 sinewave synths that either add notes above or bellow the note currently playing. The choice it makes of the next note is a weighted random value, so for example in the semitone synth there is a 25% that the next note will be a semitone up or down, 17% that it will be 2 semitones up or down etc. up to about 5-6 notes. There is also a chance the note repeats. In addition, the longer the synth has been playing the more chance the notes have of not playing at all, or playing (if the synth started silent). The song uses these 4 random note synths layered on top of each other (towards the middle you will hear about 7 semitone synths playing almost 10 notes a second each). The synths also play at different speeds.
May this collide with your soul as my soul collided with this program.
Also check out
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Supercollider
My contribution to uncyclopedia.
Cheers to Ben for pointing it out to me!
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5 comments:
He has a lot to answer for.
You forgot to mention the fact that it was ultimately Supercollider which landed man on the moon. (It was still in beta testing back then, which might explain the Apollo 13 mission in a new light). Might have been a chance operation gone awry. Surely Johnny C was accountable?
Historically, these facts are accurate. However, John Cage's probability algorhythms could never be expecteted to be understood by mere mortals, like ourselves. The fact that there was a 1/1000,000 chance the mission will fail and John Cage included this in his Supercollider patch (even in BETA stage, mind you) shows unprecedented foresight. As for the inclusion of these events in the history, they are included but in a 4'33 sort of way, so that only if you read between the spaces in the words you will see the light. The Cage lives and breathes in us... don't shut him out.
Such foresight really is beyond human comprehension, indeed. It's not that Cage DECIDED to implement these algorithms. It's that he was simply destined to from birth. The Cage just is.
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