The Revenge of Mixie Blackshort

Music - Gamelan Semar Pagulingan

There are no notes in the notebook but the insistent contrapuntal web (what a phrase?) of this music seems to driving the keys in a manner to which they are not accustomed. It has main melody lines which alternate in each year at such a speed that they become one with the whole like a glissando despite being discrete notes. Breathtaking. It may take you some time to get used to the strange tunings of Balinese and other Indonesian music but when you do it can be absolutely stunning. I seem to have got the Steve Reich simulator - Part 1 finished to an extent so maybe I should try what I have wanted to do for ages and create a Gamelan simulator. Ever since I first put cardboard over the erase heads of my first cassette recorder I have wanted to be able to integrate programming with music and now with a simple (and free) Midi control I have done just that. It gives me as much of a buzz as when I found out that you could get virtual Lego; the excitement of unlimited bricks!

I first started programming music on an Oric which I was given for some work I did at a Tandy dealership. Now compared to today's machines, the Oric is like a brick that can count but at the time it had four sound channels and you could kick them off from BASIC quite easily. I was reading Gödel, Escher, Bach at the same time and in it I found the music for The Crab Canon by Bach which plays forwards and backwards with a bit in the middle. Douglas Hofstadter, the author of the book also included a dialogue version. I programmed in each note up to half way and then had the wonderful experience of getting the computer to do the rest because it was just the first part forwards. Now Bach with beeps does not sound wonderful (unless you are Wendy Carlos). I then got a Boss Drum machine which had an accent out port. Some way I managed to get this to trigger the Oric by taking the accent pulse into one of the tape inputs. That was my limit for sequencing until I got the proper Midi kit but even then I felt hamstrung because I wanted to program the music. Now with a standard PC and a Midi Control I can do anything. On to driving the single keyboard I have left.

I was going to mention Lego but it didn't seem to fit within the sequence back there. My father is a bridge engineer (retired) and one of my early memories is coming down stairs early one morning to find a beautifully constructed suspension bridge sitting on the bookcase in the living room, complete with string to keep up the centre bit. My father was a hero for that. Lego is a wonderful toy. Imagination is required to allow the squaring the circle that has to be done to make almost anything. At the time of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project I made huge model of the two craft joined together and thought nothing of the fact that both were square cylinders; pixelation I suppose you could call it. If you think it is too expensive then buy the virtual version - as I said, unlimited bricks.

A whole day and no mention of Sylvia Plath.

Damn!