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A342585

from Ballet M​é​canique by Eidon

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  • euqinacèM is a peculiar version of "Ballet Mécanique" (1923–24), "a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy" (Wikipedia). euqinacèM plays "Ballet Mécanique" in reverse -- from its last frame to its first -- and in fast motion: 64.58 frames per second. Finally, as a soundtrack, I applied my "GoHachi" (eidon.bandcamp.com/track/gohachi).

    I found the result truly surprising! Especially when you consider that I composed the music without considering the use I ended up making of it.

    Enjoy!

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  • This is my second Dada experiment, following "euqinacèM" that I published a few months ago. The video is Walther Ruttmann's "Lichtspiel Opus 1", which has been sped up to match my track "Seventy-Four" (eidon.bandcamp.com/track/seventy-four).

    Ruttman's first Opus was created between 1919 and 1921, and is the "oldest fully abstract motion picture known to survive, using only animated geometric forms, arranged and shown without reference to any representational imagery" (M. Betancourt, "Walther Ruttmann's Lichtspiel Films". Cinegraphic. Cited by Wikipedia).

    The geometrical shapes in Léger and Murphy's "Ballet Mécanique" clearly owe to Ruttman's. For a strange kind of serendipitous magical audiovisual xenochrony, both videos appear to be in synch with my tracks, despite the fact that the decision to use them as soundtracks came to me long after I had composed them. In sooth, magic does exist!So here's to you my Klang- und Lichtspiel. I hope you'll like it!

    Includes unlimited streaming of Ballet Mécanique via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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about

A Fediverse friend (weeaboo.space/gav) contacted me yesterday. They had listened to one of my algorithmic compositions and told me "use this in something", where "this" was given by two URLs:
oeis.org/A342585 and youtu.be/_AOGsnH3UCs

(here's a link to their toot: weeaboo.space/notice/APkf2GPgnXUQ2X99O4)

The first link led me to a page of The On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (founded in 1964 by N. J. A. Sloane) -- the page describing inventory sequence "A342585": "record the number of zeros thus far in the sequence, then the number of ones thus far, then the number of twos thus far and so on, until a zero is recorded; the inventory then starts again, recording the number of zeros."
The page also provided links to interesting plots, such as Rémy Sigrist's "Scatterplot of the first 10^8 terms", which made me think of so-called permutation numbers, which I studied years ago. I immediately decided to follow Gav's suggestion! I wrote a tiny program that fed my generative engine with strings such as A(0)A(1)...A(n), where the argument of A() is the corresponding number in A342585.
The thing that I found particularly intriguing is that the procedure generating the sequence emitted zeroes with a certain frequency (at first, zeroes are the most frequent numbers; later on, other numbers become more frequent). Now, zero has a special meaning in my own generative engine: it is the code of the only "bad card" in the game that my engine simulates. This means that the behavior of the game (and thus, the music generated by my engine) would have two "trends": a regular one, when a non-zero is found in A342585, and an irregular one, when a zero is found. In other words, the fate of the game would only change when a zero is found in A342585. In musical terms, when the new input string has a non-zero A(n), then the "music quantum" generated by my engine would be very similar to that generated from the previous input string.

I did some experiments and found out that the generated music was particularly interesting when n was between 18 and 28. In that region only two zeroes were part of the sequence, which leads to simulations that produce much stability with occasional trend changes. More importantly, the stable "episodes" produced in the 18..28 region were good to my ear.

The result was manually adjusted by cutting off some music at the beginning; orchestrating the midi file generated by my engine with soundfonts for acoustic bass, marimba, celesta, kalimba, piano, oud, and percussion; and adding a bass fragment at the "new beginning" and at the end of the piece.

I hope you will enjoy the result as much as I enjoyed "playing" with A342585. My thanks to Gav for their wonderful suggestion!

credits

from Ballet M​é​canique, track released November 19, 2022
Music by Eidon. (c) Eidon (Eidon@tutanota.com, eidon.songs@gmail.com). All rights reserved.

Picture: "distances between permutation numbers of 01234567". Used by permission.

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about

Eidon Leuven, Belgium

Jazz, neo-classical, avant-pop, generative.

www.facebook.com/EidonVeda/

"Eidon put ook uit mathrock, minimal music, jazz, etnische muziek... Hij zou perfect passen als support van Gogo Penguin, Battles of Dijf Sanders en kan op termijn misschien wel een plaats veroveren op zowel Rock Werchter als Gent Jazz of Couleur Café. Benieuwd hoe hij dit live brengt"

Roel Vergauwen (Rock Werchter)
... more

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