Spekki Webu & Taufan playing live during the Mirror Zone label night in Garage Noord, December 2024.

SpekkiWebu & Taufan Live @ MirrorZone GarageNoord 14-12-2024

In the past couple of days I created a short sound piece using ChatGPT. ChatGPT works with text, not sound, so my approach was to ask it to create a program that synthesizes sound of a certain description. Similar could be done, I imagine, with prerecorded sounds, like I could ask it to create a program that combines prerecorded sounds in a certain way, but I haven't tried that yet. The resulting synthesized sound is simpler than I had originally intended, because it turned out that there is quite a limitation on how complex a program ChatGPT can create before going "off the rails" and losing the thread. After the conversation I asked it to summarize the last successful result into a new prompt. The result is this 1-minute piece to which I gave the title Etude on Sound Blocks with Normal Distribution.

Etude on Sound Blocks with Normal Distribution

A brief phrase quickly evolves and dissolves. For taishogoto. Performed by David Bohn.

Taraxacum

Dr Harrold Linguini's Hammer

Students of Decay presents The Dip, a new full-length recording by Berlin-based artist and composer Thomas Ankersmit, marking his debut with the label and sixth album to date. Comprised of two expansive, sidelong pieces composed entirely on the Serge Modular synthesizer, it signals a subtle yet significant shift in Ankersmit’s trajectory, imbuing the hyper-physical, psychoacoustic intensities of his live performances with introspective, atmospheric, and even melodic elements. 

17:54 excerpt, from "The Dip" album on Students of Decay

Drop Bass Not Bombs (nADEV) free party by Kombativ, Kloki, and DKH
Much love to all and thanks for having me

Digital set by Taufan - live mashup (selected from sound material made in last 25 years)
All material by Taufan
Fragments 18:20-22:08 and 23:10-28:20 and 59:18-1:02:15 contains material made in collaboration with Koen and Tanno in 2004.
Contains some material from my tracks Symiotic (2:54-8:43) and Turbulent Dynamics (13:00-17:08) recently released (2025) on Hangar ltd.8 (Cult Collective).

Digital set at Drop Bass Not Bombs 2025

trace was written for a dance project of Karin Post's (Take) in 1994. The concept of the piece was based on the early computer drawings of Peter Struyken (who also created the lighting-design for the project), where simple algorithmic rules govern the direction of a line. The basic structure of the four parts of the music is simply a progression of complexity from the ratio 1:2 - 2:3 - 3:4 to 4:5. These proportions are worked out on a rhythmic and structural level.

Trace by Yannis Kyriakides (1994)

(for L-system Digital Sound Synthesis)

"The development of an organism may [...] be considered as the execution
of a 'developmental program' present in the fertilised egg."
(Lindenmayer A. – Rosenberg G.: ‘Automata, Languages, Development’, 1975)


The fundamental concept behind this piece is emergence, or how a complex organism can grow and evolve in a structured environment according to its genetic predisposition. The piece itself is conceived as a constantly developing, purely synthetic musical organism. This organism is designed as a complex dynamical system whose structure develops over time. The model is implemented with a hierarchical network of Lindenmayer systems - a generative algorithm invented to model the growth of plants and muliticellular organisms. The DNA of this musical organism is embedded in the L-systems as a set of compositional and transformational rules; genetic algorithms are used to evolve these rules over time. The L-systems control a granular DSP engine in a multitude of different levels by generating a constantly varying number of musical agents with hierarchical relations that move, act and interact with and within their environment. The behavior of the agents is used to develop the initial musical seed causing complex contrapuntal patterns to emerge in all the time-scales of the composition. The piece was composed in 2006, and was awarded an honorable mention at the Gaudeamus Music Week in 2007.

The sound synthesis and algorithmic control model for this piece was developed by Stelios Manousakis, see: http://modularbrains.net/research.html

Do Digital Monkeys Inhabit Virtual Trees? [2006]

Stelios Manousakis is a composer, performer, sound artist and researcher. In these capacities he strives to develop a new musical and artistic language that is both visceral and cerebral, communicating in a purely cognitive and experiential level while being complex and multilayered.

Do Digital Monkeys Inhabit Virtual Trees? [2006]

modularbrains

Related tracks