Punk Rock Album Generator
The Punk Rock Album Generator is spreading anarchy and rebelling against the system with its questionably plagiarized lyrics
Going into this project I was thinking about how I typically don't incorporate my identity as a musician into my work, both in CFA and in SCS. Until recently my passion for music and punk rock has been a separate entity from my identity as an artist and creative coder. While I was looking at various books looking for inspiration I found my band's bass guitarist's massive Leonard Cohen bass songbook of popular rock songs, and I realized there is a standard set of conventions used in tabs, transcripts and sheet music that are pretty much universally followed: lyrics spaced over on top of bars of sheet music/tablature. To me this was a great way to get my feet wet with letting my musical self into my art world.
I used Markov chains over a relatively small and hand-picked corpus that consisted of lyrics from my favorite Green Day, Offspring, Rage Against The Machine and Sublime albums. After some tinkering I was satisfied with the whacky lyrical compositions being spit out by my program and I thought it was cool that every now and then I'd recognize the particular 2-3 songs that were being mashed together and when I shared the lyrics with my band they picked up on this as well.
At first I thought learning Basil to handle layouts was going to slow me down in that I'd have to learn a new skill, but in retrospect Basil was a very versatile and intuitive program and without it I could not have generated my totally random sheet music. Were I to revisit this project I would want to generate actual MIDI files based in music theory that actually sound like coherent songs, as well as add parts for more instruments. This is one of the few projects I have done this semester that I want to keep going with until I feel like I can sit down and record myself performing an entire procedurally-generated punk rock album on every instrument I know.
