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"I was sitting with some friends in Woodstock when a telephone call was forwarded to me from someone who claimed to be from NASA, and who wanted to use a piece of my music to contact extraterrestrial life. I said, 'C'mon, if you're for real you better send the request to me through the mail on official NASA letterhead!'"

Laurie Spiegel is a composer and a humanist software developer. [more inside]
posted by obscurator on Dec 19, 2012 - 10 comments

Looking for an hour of monkey-themed music? Maybe you want to remember Ceefax and the ZX Spectrum while enjoying an introduction to personal computing? Want something to listen to while styling your hair or trimming your facial hair? Or maybe you just want a good hour of celebrities singing, Rolling Stones covers, or John Williams tunes.

Welcome to the historic sound of the future at the Project Moonbase weekly podcast.
posted by Katemonkey on Nov 17, 2012 - 1 comment

Evolution of music by public choice. Results are out from the DarwinTunes experiment (previously) - a Darwinian music engine working with mutating short audio loops that underwent evolutionary selection for 2,513 generations under the influence of thousands of listeners. Article in the Proc. Nat'l Acad. Sci. You can participate at the DarwinTunes web site.
posted by exogenous on Jun 19, 2012 - 41 comments

"This site features the full audio from the rare LP record First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival, published by Creative Computing in 1979." [more inside]
posted by not_on_display on Dec 2, 2010 - 6 comments

The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half.
posted by Obscure Reference on May 22, 2010 - 90 comments

It's the mid 1980's, computer games are stored on cassette tapes and they take a very long time to load. This lead to the creation of loading music. [more inside]
posted by hellojed on Jun 15, 2009 - 31 comments

Computer music is relatively old, going back to the very early 1950s. In the following decades, people have been creative with programmable technology, leading to "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" being played on an IBM chain printer back in 1966, and in more recent years, HP ScanJet 5100c included an Easter Egg. The HP ScanJet 4c's SCL (Scanner Control Language) unofficial PLAY TUNE command lead to these fine little ditties. Now over a decade ago, the duo known as [The User] enlisted three specialists to operate a computer program via a server that synchronized the dot-matrix printers and read complex ASCII text files in order to create musical compositions. The result was a techno-sounding piece that was performed by the administrators of the system, rather than one that was simply being played. Like a symphony of car horns, the coordination of these printers became Symphony #1 and #2 for Dot Matrix Printers (samples of Symphony #2, Symphony #2 Slashdot thread). [More computer music exploration inside] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on May 26, 2009 - 27 comments

LilyPond is a free, mature, actively developed "automated engraving system" for the production of beautifully formatted musical scores. Essay and examples from the site. All major platforms are supported.
posted by teleskiving on Apr 22, 2005 - 9 comments

ixi software is a network of experimentalists in the field of computer music and computer music software. Don't miss their cool downloads.
posted by signal on May 8, 2002 - 6 comments