a singular christmas

this album was made by having a computer listen to christmas records for two weeks in an attempt to understand just what qualifies as holiday music. Yes, its slightly awful, but just as often there is something as dark and compelling as titles like "berries sleeping" would imply. Bring your own milk.

a singluar christmas

dont know exactly how the analysis worked, but the website told me this:

The recipe for generating this Eigenmusic (”synthesized music representing the maximal variety of the input music”) was cooked up in 2003 as the live radio station “Eigenradio.” It was a hilarious joke if you laughed at beehives, pleasing if you liked electric closets. Here’s what the process is: you parameterize music into some set of features (pitch content, frequency response, high level structure, etc) and set some rate — say a set of features every 100 milliseconds or four beats. You then pass those series of features to a popular statistical algorithm that tries to remove dependence among variables in the feature– removing “redundant” information– perceptual compression. Repetitive structures such as beat and harmony are whittled down to a representation that can always expand back later.

As for the role of composer, maybe semi-conductor– I locked myself and family up in a darkened studio on the top floor at MIT, we turned up the speakers, played every track in a row, and I hovered my index finger over the Delete key. There’s not a single window in that place, but I’m sure it started snowing.



my current fav is "mountain Noel"