Also, for those of us who’re more rock-inclined, you can steal a page from Rivers Cuomo’s playbook (dude from Weezer, if you didn’t know) and use d20′s to determine your set list.

Killstring´s last blog post..Mark Gridley

There’s a great little exhibit in the Haus der Musik (http://hausdermusik.at/en/2.htm) in Vienna where you can compose a minuet based on chance. They have big fuzzy dice that have sensors in them, so when you throw them, the number that comes up pops up on the screen and plugs in a section of music. It’s pretty nifty.

I never thought of using it for techno, but that makes sense, too. As one of my students says, “Techno is looping one thing over and over until your listener is tired with it, and then adding one little ‘ding!’ in that same loop… looping that until the listener is tired with it…” etc etc. He’s not too far off from the truth.

The studio notes duplicated in “More Dark Than Shark” list backgammon dice as essential to Brian Eno’s early studio hardware; being based on powers of two, they’re a great way for relatively conventional composers to decide how many times to repeat something. This goes back at least to Mozart, though, who famously had a dice game for composition – google “aleatoric music” and you get the whole history of chance-based (more often than not, dice-based) music on up from Mozart to John Cage and, more recently, the generative music of Koan (championed by Eno, no surprise there, and later shrunk down by Thomas Dolby’s Beatnik system), and other software packages that do for aleatoric music what Neverwinter Nights did for dice-based RPGs.

This sort of thing works great for techno, especially if a DJ’s ultimately gonna decide when and how your composition begins and ends, but it doesn’t generate much emotion or plot…luckily Homo sapiens are already MUCH too good at projecting their own ideas of emotion and plot on any random data they’re presented, giving us the concept of stochasticism.

Don’t worry though…I have the an entire campaign planed out and I have the next adventure almost ready. They are about 6Lv and I plan to fold the campaign around 16-18Lv after a great climactic ending. I do need some time to get the adventures ready and I am looking forward to playing for a change.=P