A patient or a musician steers a generative music process by feeling. Move the point on the feeling pad, or let a simulated breath do it, and the system turns emotional state into tempo, harmony, density and space. The longer the person plays, the more the person learns, so long as the assistance knows how to withdraw. The age of the listener chooses the soundscape of a generation, and the soundscape passes through scenes as time goes by. Three soundscapes beyond the generations can be reached, and any soundscape can be fused with another, layer by layer.
ROLE patientMOOD calmTEMPO 72 bpmMODE dorianSOUNDSCAPE —SCENE —
notes played by the personnotes completed by the systembass and pulse
VIRTUOSITY
0%
Novice
SYSTEM FIT
0%
how well it anticipates this person
PAIR PERFORMANCE
0%
assistance now 70%
CO-LEARNING FACTOR
—
measuring…
RESONANCE
0%
—
How feeling becomes music
Valence, left to right, sets the mode, from the darker modes on the left to the brighter ones on the right, with a set of five for each soundscape, and the pitch of the notes played by gesture.
Arousal, bottom to top, sets the tempo, from 56 to 128 bpm before the soundscape scales it, together with the rhythm section and the register of the melody.
Tension adds chord tones and clusters, opens the filter and calls the shimmer.
Density sets the hats, the melodic events and the texture, and space sets the reverberation and the delay.
Assistance smooths the feeling signal, snaps gestures to the beat and the chord, and completes the melody.
How the person learns
Practice, by movement or by the simulated breath, raises virtuosity, faster when the assistance is low, and heavy assistance with little practice lets it decay.
The system fit grows with practice and with its learning rate.
Effective assistance is the base assistance times one minus the withdrawal times the virtuosity.
Pair performance is one minus the product of the person's shortfall and the system's shortfall.
The co-learning factor is the rate at which the person gains, divided by the rate at which the pair gains.
How generations hear
The listener's age picks a generation, and each generation has a soundscape drawn from the music of its formative years: toy-box for Alpha, lo-fi bedroom for Gen Z, indie electronic for Millennials, synth-pop for Gen X, soft rock and folk for Boomers and ballroom and hymn, in waltz time, for the Silent generation.
Each soundscape has its own instruments, rhythm, progressions and modes, and its own vocabulary for the same place on the feeling pad, so that the upper right of the pad is thrilled for a child, euphoric for a teenager, elated for a millennial, exultant for Gen X, joyous for a boomer and delighted for the Silent generation.
How the soundscape changes
Evolution lets the soundscape pass through scenes, intro, groove, bloom, break and lift, each with its own layers, progression and register, and sometimes a new key, and the feeling of the player weights which scene comes next.
Resonance compares the era of the soundscape with the formative years of the listener, taken as roughly seventeen years after birth, and it moves the practice by up to a fifth, upward when the music is the listener's own.
Morfusione carries the soundscape toward any other, including three that belong to no generation, spectral drone, minimal phasing and industrial noise. Progression, pad, bass, rhythm and melody change hands one after the other, so that the middle of the journey is a hybrid and not a fade.
Radicalism pushes the music away from the middle, so that the tempo runs from about 42 to 188 bpm before the soundscape scales it, the far edges of the pad open the locrian and whole-tone scales, tension piles up clusters, and the leaps of the melody widen.
The soundscapes are stipulated sketches of the idioms of an era and not claims about what any person likes, which is why the soundscape can always be chosen by hand.
An illustrative model of the idea behind MINDKESTRA (mindkestra.com), written for the essay Human Machine, between Co-Learning and Knowledge Transfer. It is not the actual protocol and not a medical device, and every parameter is stipulated. Virtuosity grows with practice and with friction, the assistance retires as the person improves according to the law of withdrawal, and the co-learning factor compares the person's gain with the gain of the pair. With constant support the pair performs well while the person learns little. With withdrawal the person becomes the virtuoso. The tempo, the mode and the density follow the feeling, and the sound can be switched on at any time. The generational soundscapes are stipulated sketches of the idioms of an era and not claims about individual taste, and the resonance between a soundscape and the formative years of the listener is a stipulated function that changes the practice by at most a fifth.