Tim Thompson, Prototypical - 58m 18s

Tracks & Durations

1. Autograph	3:05
2. Twinkle Tune	4:23
3. Fluence	1:29
4. Group Effort	2:07
5. State Machine	3:15
6. Shameless Boogie	3:27
7. Caffeine-Based Life Form	4:41
8. Lineage	1:51
9. Hypercube	10:08
10. Friendly Phases	5:58
11. Stock Answer #1	3:38
12. Shadow Suite	6:30
13. Stock Answer #3	4:43
14. Last Call	2:54

Note: The information about this album is acquired from the publicly available resources and we are not responsible for their accuracy.

Review

Prototypical is a melodic fusion of new age, jazz, and rock with tasteful helpings of algorithmic composition. It contains an hour of clearly-stated and evolving melodies and solos, spanning a variety of styles. At one end of the spectrum you'll find solo piano improvisation and boogie woogie, in the middle you'll find lots of happy-sounding electronic jazz, and at the far end of the spectrum you'll find music that is completely algorithmic.

In the liner notes of Prototypical, Tim details the ways in which the pieces were composed. Here are some of the more interesting descriptions:

Group Effort - This was done as part of the "MIDI Playgroup" project on the Internet, organized by Matt Blais in 1992. Several dozen people contributed small snippets of MIDI music, usually only a measure or two, and the collection was distributed to the group. The goal was for everyone to create music using the snippets in any way they wanted. This piece was my result, created by using the then-newly-written multi-window interface of Keykit to manipulate the snippets. I used the mouse exclusively - I never touched a musical keyboard when creating this piece.

Stock Answer #1 - On the "Mostly MIDI Mailing List", I proposed a game in which everyone would take a short musical phrase and compose music based on it. The phrase was generated from the letters of the word "Weinstock" - hence the name of the game was "The Weinstock Variations". The game kind of fizzled (only one person besides me finished anything), but I got two pieces out of it, so for me it was a smashing success. This one uses an ostinato that was algorithmically generated from the letters in "Weinstock", and the sequence of transpositions over the length of the piece was also based on the letters. I improvised and algorithmically manipulated the melodies.

Stock Answer #3 - This was my second piece for "The Weinstock Variations". It is completely algorithmically generated from a KeyKit program. (Well, okay, I manually removed a few of the less interesting measures to tighten it up, but I didn't modify any of the notes.) The overall heuristic was to generate a lot of echoes and then arpeggiate the results. The same algorithmic technique is the basis of "Algorithm B" in the Muse-O-Matic toy on my web site.

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