Albert Haddock Who Discovered Fish

Listening to Triple Quartet by Steve Reich

Mr Reich has been on TV and Radio a lot recently and seems to have won the competition for the Greatest Living Composer in the USA. Much as he is my favourite American composer I would really have given that to John Adams.

I transferred all the VB note generator software to the new PC over the weekend and found that the new midi instruments sound more genuine than those of the old set. The vibraphone and marimba especially, sound as real as possible. I set up the program to not only change the melody by one note in each 32 played but to add and remove notes in the same time frame. This means that with starting keys and instruments set for each of the four channels you can start with no notes on the board at all and leave the machine to run creating a completely random construction. After a while it begins to get a bit muddy so I need to keep a count of the total number of notes in each bar and weight the removal of filled in notes after this point to keep a general level of 'filled-in-ness'. Changing key randomly is also an option but has to be done sparingly as you have to have a few bars to get used to the new key.