Over the spring and summer of 2020 my students and I worked on a four-channel soundscapes installation that created a continuously remixed and varying aural collage of sound recorded from around the globe: Ecuador, Japan, Cuba, Antarctis, Europe, etc.

The software was written by Clarissa Ray Porst in PD using some of my Markov Chain routines to determine the order of the fourteen three-minute pieces: each composer decided the probabilities of any of the other pieces following on from theirs. I then tweaked the overall probabilities with the aim of a balanced presentation and for the youtube version generated an almost seven-hour mix automatically, taking one of the many possible sequences generated by the PD software and writing the DAW file iteratively in Common Lisp, then rendering (here in stereo). Nice and efficient and a great piece of work by the composers involved.

 

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