AMM™ 0.0.0 alpha

Say hello to Automatic Morricone Machine™.

AMM™ is the latest offering from the researchers at buster & friends’ C-ALTO (Crafty Application of the Low-Tech and Outmoded) labs, the developers of the finest eComposers™ in the industry. Parents and children; musicians, non-musicians; critics and arts administrators will find Automatic Morricone Machine™ both entertaining and educational.

Automatic Morricone Machine™ is designed around the same advanced artificial musical sensibility engine (AAMSE) that forms the core of many buster & friends’ eMusic™ systems, including Messiaen Machine™ and SimJazz: the personal desktop bop simulator™. Although SimJazz™ suffered from unacceptable stability problems in its pre-release versions, much work has been done to address the complications of the AAMSE components (not least by removing Andrew Murray Campbell from the development team).

The AAMSE development team worked for almost a year in order to add yet more advanced features. These include the all-new shared-aesthetics library; procedural and functional affections; a speedy passion lookup table; an improved low-level sensibility debugger; and numerous critical knee-jerk suppressors. Enduring over a thousand coffee breaks, the development team finally…

…Gave up and started from scratch: Say hello to Automatic Morricone Machine™.

Okay, okay, what is Automatic Morricone Machine™.

AMM™ is a low-tech, audio-visual, algorithmic etude based on ‘Humanity’ by Ennio Morricone from John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ (1982).

The unifying joke of AMM™ is that the machine’s behavior is driven by simple pseudo-random generators or so-called ‘fractal’ noise. 1/f-noise and random-walk processes are used to create variations on Morricone’s music, and a ‘midpoint subdivision’ algorithm is used to generates the visual ‘landscape’ (samples of which can be found at the AMM™ online gallery). The lack of information embedded in the audio-visual output is designed to induce the audience to find imaginary patterns.

All delivered in an attractive sci-fi B-movie package.

And, by the way, the TM stands for Temporal Morphologies :-)

Source code for Automatic Morricone Machine™ is currently available on request (requires HMSL to run program). I’m happy to provide the source code, but I can’t offer any documentation at the moment, and please note that the software is very much ‘alpha.’