Musical Mesostics

Audio for this style algorithm.

Acrostic formatting of sheet music.

Mesostic formatting of sheet music.

Standard formatting of sheet music.

This style algorithm is a musical mapping of the poetry generating process devised by John Cage known as Mesostics. This musical version creates a simple melody to serve as the “source text” based on the seed supplied by the user.

The “spine text” is whatever melody is chosen by the user that is available in the software. The example above uses the famous theme from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The software reduces the volume of the source music to pppp and then begins searching the music for the notes making up the spine melody. When it finds them, in order, it increases their volume to ff creating, hopefully, an aural analogue to the visual formatting Cage used in his mesostics. You can have the software stop after it has found the spine melody once or keep going to find as many notes as it can.

There are three different ways to present the music visually though the audio is exactly the same. The acrostic style puts each spine note at the beginning of its own line and colors it red. The mesostic style makes sure each spine note has its own line and will be somewhere in the middle of that line. And the standard style formats the sheet music normally (I say “normally” but all the crazy options I throw at the sheet music generating software Lilypond are anything but normal).

I am always looking for more melodies to add. If you have any ideas please pass them along to me. One caveat though, they must either be in the public domain or if you own the music then you must license it using a very liberal license like Creative Commons. The format for submission looks like this:

["Fifth Symphony (long)"] = {motif = "P5,P5,P5,m3,P4,P4,P4,M2",composer = "Ludwig v Beethoven"},

The first name is a unique identifier for the theme. Following this are the intervals used in the original. Note that we don't actually try to preserve the original key.