Transition is a algorithmic summary of my entire musical output since I started writing in 2003. Every little experiment, every finished song. It's part generative music piece, part data-visualization. The audio was generated with an algorithm that I wrote to scan through my music collection in date-order, taking little slices of audio from each track and stitching it all together to form a continous mix. It compresses weeks worth of music down to minutes. It's akin to granular synthesis but over a much larger time-scale. Occasionally it takes longer slices. There are 2 summaries, ranging from several minutes to over an hour. They are labelled with roman numerals.
The visual element is based on growth rings in trees. I love how scientists can use growth rings to travel back in time and learn about the atmospheric conditions that year. Trees don't just encode their own history inside, but also the history of their surroundings. I wondered if by analysing my entire musical output I could not just see how my music has changed over time, but also my environment. Just like growth rings, the most central rings are the earliest. Each ring represents a month. Thicker rings occur every year. Each direction out from the center represents a different analysed property of the tracks I made that month. If the rings in that direction are further apart it means that property is increasing. Closer together and it's decreasing. Dashed lines are months that I didn't make any music. 2016 was a bad year...
This experiment is the accompaniment to the Transition EP, to be released 23/02/18 on Mesh .
It works best in chrome on desktop.
You can find all the code on my Github, if you want to make summaries of your own music.