The conceit at play here is that for every name, every word, every number, every sequence of orthographic symbols planned out or generated at random, there exists a piece of music, a Musical Platonic Ideal, which resides in the kosmos noetos, the Platonic æther, that fully represents it.

This music does not conform to any human idea of what constitutes beautiful or good music. It is not constrained by our memories, our likes and dislikes, our egos. It is not so wrapped up within a particular cultural milieu that it is constrained by the melodies and rhythms of that culture. It transcends any human conception of art, of music.

It is infinite in length. It is free from human constraints.

We cannot hear it. We can but imagine its existence. Perhaps we can connect with it through our own musical endeavors.

Taking our initial collection of orthographic symbols, we can construct a vulgar manifestation of the Musical Platonic Ideal that too is infinite and unconfined by humanity’s finite æsthetic crudeness. That is only constrained by the technology of our computers and the software they execute. This music is stored as long series of numbers within the Platonic Music Engine.

Though theoretically infinite, as finite beings we must truncate this music. We can only listen to, deal with, a finite subset of the whole infinite. We take comfort in the fact that we could, in theory, generate note after note of this realization throughout the infinite expanses of time even if reality keeps us from this pursuit.

When we listen to this vulgar manifestation of the Ideal we notice something rather quickly: it sounds random.

There is a good reason for this, it is generated via a random number generator. Or more specifically a pseudo random number generator. This generator is actually entirely deterministic but produces results that appear to the human, as well as mathematic’s, eye as being random.

Since we humans are so limited by our memories, our like and dislikes, our egos, the software then provides us the means to shape this random-sounding music into sounding something more recognizably musical, less random. Or something that matches our desires for an aural æsthetic experience.

The software, the Platonic Music Engine, does this by generating the core elements of music (pitch, duration and volume) for your instrument using whatever scale, tuning, reference pitch, and other parameters, you specify.

The PME takes this version of the music and makes available collections of functions, called Style Algorithms, whose job is to make the music sound, in a superficial manner, similar to existing musical ideas.

The PME is not limited to the classical music of the West but ideally will contain within its code every musical idea that has ever existed and every musical idea that will ever be conceived.

I will need help to pull this off.

While work continues, please take the PME for a spin. If you have any ideas for future Style Algorithms please share them with me. If you have the ability to program then by all means create your own Style Algorithms to share with others.

Art, etc

The above was written when the PME only contained music. It now includes visual art (painting), poetry, and other text-based works. The same idea applies as above. I didn‘t want to rewrite it given its highly poetic nature.