I'm not a fan of profligate Flash usage, but a few sites that carry my stuff do let you play it that way. So here's a collection of those. Play them all at once for maximum confusion!

My albums are now available at archive.org in their full glorious fidelity FOR FREE, with graphics of the whole CD packages, if you feel like printing 'em up.

The Old Double Melman,
Cubeworld Vacation,
Ayatollah of Understatement.

Site offers downloads in various formats, as well as streaming. On the other hand, the site's also often very busy, so if things don't work out on your first visit, consider trying again.

Three years in the making, this is the official release of The Old Double Melman Adventures in QuickTime Musical Instruments, a CD now on sale at lulu.com.

This is in the tradition of music boxes and Raymond Scott. Gryltose is my answer to Scott's Powerhouse.



Many of the tracks are also available in lower-fidelity versions, here, free.

Among other software used in the making of this album are RedMoon's maxWerk, Motu's Digital Performer and Audacity. Graphics by Bryce, mostly.

History of General MIDI and QMI

The General MIDI spec was formalized in 1991. General MIDI (GM) implementations consisted of simulations of standard instruments like pianos, guitars, drums, fiddles and oboes, as well as sound effects like helicopters and birds. This gave the computer musician a built-in orchestra that was heir to those "consumer electronics" keyboards that Casio and others were selling. Once you had GM installed on your computer, you could create hours and hours of MIDI files and still be able to fit those files on the 2.8 meg diskettes of the day. If you fed the MIDI data from your computer to a different device, such as a Roland keyboard, the resulting music would sound similar.

QuickTime Musical Instruments was Apple's version of GM, first introduced in version 2 of QuickTime, their multimedia playing and editing software suite.

What we're talking about here is something meant to be the living room piano, a parlour orchestra to accompany the odd video game or slide show. The individual instruments often sounded like bits from 1970s vintage television show themes.

And so this became a folk instrument of the 1990s.

The Old Double Melman is the name I give to my technique of taking two identical (or NEARLY identical) tracks of music, processing them separately and then recombining them in a process I also call Brute Force Additive Synthesis.

Most of these tracks were created using Redmoon's maxWerk software (I think of it as being similar to a fabric loom.) Motu's Digital Performer was used for some arpeggiations and other tweakage. Apple's QuickTime Musical Instruments created the actual sounds, often two or more versions that were then individually tweaked and then recombined using Audacity.

_{(also available online, at archive.org)}

This is the song that wowed everybody.

I was watching a news story on a guy who'd been on a sex offender registry, committed another offense, did time, was released, and had yet further constraints put on his activities.

Sounded to me like his life was down to a list of stuff he couldn't do.

So I wrote a song.

Here's the song. (stream or download)

OR, if you wanna sing it yourself, Here's a MIDI and here are the lyrics:

Anyway, the graphic above is from an animation I've been working on, slowly, for the song's video.

Here are a few more shots from that (click thumbnails for large versions):

Back in the 1980s, I got an Emax keyboard, and one patch was of voices -- for instance, a demo sequence was the Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want.

Also, the Emax had a great arpeggiator. So, I thought to myself, "Self, wouldn't this be a great chance to make something sounding like Philip Glass?"

Here's the music.

And since then, I've done some graphics for it.

700 x 700
480 x 360

And, if you love those, you can spend money on it!

Finally, here are some things I did some masking with Bryce and then Photoshopped. Click to see full-sized version.