miching

When I set out to build my command-line interface application, I knew I wanted to find an application programming interface which was related in some capacity to music. After some research, combing through lists of free API's, I still hadn't found something which resonated which me. A moment later, though, I typed in the words 'baroque music API' into the Google search box and lo! OpenOpus.org was one of the first results.

As I began examining the metadata contained within the OpenOpus API, I recalled how struck I'd been in a recent lesson in which I discovered .sample -- a Ruby method which allows you to extract a random value from an array of data. I remember being moved by that particular concept, because as when one rolls dice, picks a random card, or flips a coin, what are the forces at play in determining what side of the coin falls, or which side of the dice is on top? Plainly, when a machine makes a random selection, how does it do that?

Since Bach was a numerologist, deeply spiritual, but also intensely analytical, I decided to build a little cleromancy machine which would receive a genre name (chamber, keyboard, orchestral, or vocal) as user input, and then use .sample to spit out a 'random' title of a piece by Bach which fits into that genre.

Another facet of random selection that interests me is the way one can use games or activities of chance within structured parameters to increase or enrich creativity, as with Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies -- a deck of cards, upon each is an insight or a directive for musicians and producers when they are working in the studio and get stuck. For instance, one might draw a card which says 'use an old idea', or 'honour thy error as hidden intention', or 'what would your closest friend do?'. These cards were inspired in part, I've read, by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese tradition of cleromancy.