Surreptitious Serendipity
Saturday March 22, 2008
A month of blistering busyness since last I scribbled herein. Some good, and some not-so-good times. My distended social life barely resembles the crumbs of potential that were once the possibility of enjoying a beverage or three down the local; an iniquitous state of affairs in general.
However, since about a week ago things have been looking up – with progress on the project, a completed essay and other miscellaneous coursework annihilated at the hands of many a nocturnal work shift. Closure is near.
Research has been an interesting experience, positive and negative outcomes abound. It’s been interesting to read about and listen to the achievements of more in-depth research on the topic. The time constraints on BlueJam have been pretty tight (six months in total, only four on implementation…) The most time consuming-part being understanding and deciding how best to represent the musical components.
As an overall result, the codebase for BlueJam has a lot of modularity and has turned into more of a framework for combining evolutionary algorithms and music, using (by default) a tree representation for note sequences; the favoured data-structure for Genetic Programming and the like, due to its malleability. There are also plenty of musical algorithms in BlueJam for calculating scales and accidentals accurately, as well as converting pitch and octave pairs to MIDI numbers, and performing operations (transposition, key changing) over this data.
More information about that soon – in RL I have a various reports and diagramming to do, followed by a substantial amount of partying. The cycle continues though, finals on the horizon…
