From what I can remember, this song was created, like many other pieces of mine, somewhat inadvertently. In this case, the project that was the genesis for Scherzo was the beginnings of a depressing-sounding visage-of-war track, complete with synth winds and battle ambiance. This project has yet to actually see completion, but as a result, I began to play around with some elongated string melodies, somewhat in the style of Samuel Barber’s Adagio. As I began to focus on the string arrangements, the song began to take on a life of its own, and when I had finished, I had created a new piece in its own right, albeit too upbeat for my project.

Originally, I was going to end it on the third note from the last, but after listening to it, I realized that it ended what had become a more upbeat and calming piece with a dark-sounding chord, and it seemed an awkward way to finish the song, so I added in the final two chords to compensate.

Startup is really a very simple idea – it is a sequenced song composed entirely of Macintosh startup sounds throughout the years. This song was composed in a very simple sound editor, so it’s not particularly complicated – but it’s actually a fairly relaxing piece, and definitely unique.

This is the first try at using digital sound patches in Melody Assistant. It was an interesting song to write, especially with the beat patterns. The song actually started from a very simple beat pattern, and evolved from there. When I finally ended up with the finished project, though, after 3 iterations, I was still unsatisfied with how it sounded. I began to fool around with it in SoundMaker, and decided that it sounded much better reversed – and so it turned into Beatbox 5A.

Beatbox 5A was largely an experiment with how far I could push my music program. At this point, I was still only using Melody Assistant, and some sound editors. Sufficed to say, this is the actual “release” version of the song that is Beatbox 3, and is essentially that piece, with some modifications, and played in reverse. I’m sure it’s been done before, but the reverse sound, especially after the piece was changed to make it work, give the piece a better feel, and doesn’t sound as straightforward and plodding as the original version.

The original for this song actually came into being about three years ago, when I was testing the limits of a newly acquired sound program (see The Big Mixx for more on this). At any rate, after working on part of it, music dropped off the map for a while, and I somewhat forgot about its existence. While working on some other music a couple of years later, though, I came across this track and realized that it sounded cool enough to deserve finishing. So, after upgrading the samples and messing around with the end of it, I had a decent composition. While repeptitive in parts, it has some nice sequences towards the middle and a decent ending.

Kyoto Nights was created using an innovative technique for creating freeform music – a program called ColorMusic (written by Shinichiro Hirama). This program translates the movement of a mouse over contrasting colors in an image file, and converts the result to music in the form of a midi sequencer file. The raw source for Kyoto Nights came from using a screenshot from the game Oni, and then edited and processed with different instruments in Melody Assistant.