Date Line Merry Christmas...

Here’s to all the Australian and Japanese (and Taiwanese and Korean, I guess) AI readers who are already in to Christmas. Or whatever the analog is in your country/culture/ethnic subset. Merry Whatever!

While we’re on the subject (we weren’t, of course) why don’t you go have Pete Townsend paint your musical portrait. That should be good for hours of fun. Note: it is a fairly involved process, needs a significant amount of input from you, and it has a soul-searing EULA that you need to sign to access the meat. The license to your portraits belongs to them (this makes a certain amount of sense, because their software created it, I suppose) and if you play these portraits for anyone else, you essentially violate the license. (Section 2.3 of the EULA, if you’re curious.)

Personally, I find that to be a bit silly, but there you go. It is an interesting application of generative music, but sounds pretty machine-made when you get down to it. So my question basically thus: why don’t people that make generative music software ever put timing drift in to the output?

Oh, And… It’s not my habit to advertise for other folks, but these guys are cool, and I have and use all their products. Soniccouture is having a sale that ends at midnight GMT tonight (so about 7.5 hours left). I recommend you get the Electronica Collection. Tons of useful stuff in there.