A musician reflects on creating a concept album during the pandemic, embracing personal limitations while collaborating with session musicians and producers. The track 'Age of Rust' combines samples, vocal performances from Crazy 8 the Great, and contributions from multiple musicians to tell the story of a traumatized robot character named Officer Marion.
Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Cookbook, originally written in 1976 as a grant-funded composer documentation, describes her compositional practice on the Buchla 248 synthesizer through cooking metaphors and detailed signal paths. This digital edition presents the original text alongside Ciani's 1976 tape examples, with recreated diagrams and audio illustrations, and includes an interview reflecting on how the Cookbook emerged from her pioneering work as a Buchla performer and her distinctive approach to diatonic, systems-based composition in 1970s avant-garde music.
YuE2 is a music generation system that creates songs from lyrics and style prompts by first generating an editable melodic and harmonic score, then synthesizing complete audio with vocals and accompaniment. It achieves competitive quality with proprietary systems like Suno v5/6 and supports zero-shot covers and agentic editing through a white-box symbolic planning approach.
Orchflows is a framework that simplifies AI agent workflows by reducing complexity to just two core skills: work (making results) and review (judging them). Rather than prescriptive skill libraries that become rigid and age poorly, Orchflows separates reusable workflow structures from modular guidance documents, allowing workflows to remain stable across model upgrades while model-specific corrections are easily updated or removed.
Composer Koji Kondo created memorable ocarina melodies in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time using only five pitches (D, F, A, B, and high D). Link learns twelve songs by playing five-note trigger motives on the controller, which the game automatically completes with orchestrated answer sections, allowing Kondo compositional freedom beyond the initial pitch limitation.