Ghost In The Machine

Today something strange and magical and tragic happened.

I was struggling to create the "right" sound for a lead line in one of the tracks I'm working on. I was using Crystal, which has a brilliant "breed" feature that lets you create new patches pseudo-randomly by mixing the properties of two existing patches while applying a "mutation" factor to mix things up a bit. There I was, cruising along breeding all kinds of weird and useless sounds, when Live locked up. It kept producing audio though, and kept looping the same eight bars I was listening to before- I just couldn't interact with the GUI nor stop it from playing. This would normally be more annoyance than tragedy, except that suddenly Crystal started going nuts. I'm not exactly sure how to describe it- I think it must have gotten stuck in some kind of infinite-breed loop, but it started spitting out the strangest and coolest sounds ever. It was still playing the MIDI notes that I had recorded previously, but the sound was all over the place! It'd go from a simple electric-piano kinda thing into crazy delayed-out, filtered randomness... you kind of had to be there to appreciate it.

The sad part is that I think it was the perfect thing for my song, but I couldn't capture it. And now 1GB of hard drive space has mysteriously disappeared from my Windows partition despite the fact that I wasn't recording when this all went down. Not that that second part is particularly sad, more just weird really. But a little sad because I only have 50MB free now. Maybe just melancholy.

In any case, I've decided that I'm not going to be frustrated about this; rather, I'm going to appreciate it as a one-time randomly great thing and move on. After all, it's not very often that one's computer is inspired to create music with it's operator... unless we're talking FM synthesis. *

Who knew buggy software could be so inspirational?

* Sorry, couldn't help the synth-nerd joke. Maybe this will help explain how hilarious and clever I am.