Language Machines

LM is a simple ASCII-art style programmatic animation created with the Processing Java dialect. The animation was partly influenced by the droid factory scenes in 'Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones'.

The accompanying music is likewise built from simple (musical) primitive elements and was generated using 2 different Python programs. My 'Hamiltonian Cat Flap' algorithmic music system was used to generate a simple main melody (the choir/vocal sound), using a melody corpus built from the main keyboard riffs of 4 Depeche Mode songs. The full machine-music style MIDI track was then generated programmatically with a purpose-written Python program, rather than by using any existing sequencer software. The arrangement was influenced by Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode.

Note: The original animation video I uploaded was perfectly smooth, synchronised and a reasonably small compact file. YouTube's conversion process seems to have introduced an unfortunate slight visual jerky unevenness. Probably not very noticeable if not looking for it, but could do with further thinking about. Looks best at highest quality resolution of course.