impossible musicThis music is apparently created by a type of fractal known as a strange attractor. The image drawn on a computer screen by the strange attractor was converted into real-time midi data and used to trigger a digital piano and a sampler. The resulting music is intriguing, often sounding uncannily like a particularly modernist take on free improvisation or a electronic series of Webern miniatures. Matthias Ebbinghaus is credited with operating piano pedals and performing a 'live mix', so it would seem logical to credit some of the structuring and organization of sound here to human agency, but this CD remains a compelling argument for those who see music as a particularly passionate branch of mathematics or physics. Unfortunately the sound of the electric piano becomes somewhat one-dimensional after extended listening. Maybe next time Michael Peters can persuade his program to produce a written score and then have a human play the results on a real piano? As it is Impossible Music is a compelling investigation into the capacity of computers to 'compose' or 'improvise' music and I look forward to hearing Michael Peters' further investigations. -- nick ilott
:: Michael Peters/Impossible Music - hyperfunction/A-Musik.
