Siwei Xie – Looking Outwards – 10

Microscale is a generative and web-based album. I admire it because although the creator has written generative/algorithmic music before, and almost all of his previous work has procedurally generated material, microscale is his first fully generative album which was created from a “generative” idea. Creator’s artistic sensibilities manifest because this album has been created not so much by thinking, as by emotions – so it’s not purely artificial intelligence or computer music. 

The music on microscale is generated in real-time from random Wikipedia articles. Each article becomes a step sequencer, where the letters are the sequencer steps and the track titles are regular expressions that switch the steps of the sequencers on and off.

The concept of the album is to show that through transforming one media (text) into another media (music), the meaning can be transformed – the article has its own meaning, but the music has a completely different meaning. And it’s not just one-to-one transformation – there are six articles (i.e. six meanings), which although unrelated to each other, create a whole piece of music that has one singular meaning.

Link to original source.