Rough Raga Riffs




hardware:   NeXT machine
software:   cmix, rt


There is a story I tell about the genesis of this piece: You can actually hear the evolution of the style-modeling rules I encoded through the piece. For example, about a third of the way through I 'taught' the style-model how to do the Eddy Van Halen trick of tapping on the guitar strings to produce a fast, repeating sequence of notes. I find this co-development of code and music to be a very congenial way to create music.

See the commentary about my piece Almost Real for more observations about style-modeling. There are a couple of things I would probably change about Rough Raga Riffs if I did it over: one is to slightly shorten the roller-coaster-like riffs towards the end of the piece, and the other (which I should probably correct anyhow) would be to remove a strong DC bias component that compromises the dynamic range of the piece and makes it a lot softer than other recordings.

When I did this piece it typically took hours to render a musical passage. The basic code is now included as a demo of my max/msp external object [maxlisp] object, running in real-time without causing the processor to break a sweat.

The original LISP source code I used to create Rough Raga Riffs is available here.