Kwaidan
“Yesterday evening something interesting happened to me; I wrote down a random string and used it as input for generating a number of seeds for my music. When I listened to it, I realized there were two themes that I felt were 'special'; they were beautiful to my ear. I wish I were able to compose one such theme, I said to myself. So I set myself in motion as if I was possessed by those musical ideas. I mixed the material into a piece made of four parts. When I finished, it was quite late in the night...”
(from a message I wrote to a dear friend of mine).
- I Seibu 『声部』means 'Voice'. I heard this voice and was captured by its serenity — a serenity that does not comes from a human mind. A ghostly voice, perhaps? Two instruments play this Voice: bassoon and English horn. Tubular bells signal the end of this piece. The theme is a representation of the pack in the hands of one of the two players.
- II Kwaidan 『怪談』 is an orchestration of the above 'Voice'. In addition to bassoon and English horn I have strings and double bass. Strings “play” the pack of cards “on the table”.
- III Xenocronia plays the second Voice in a xenochrony of bassoon, English horn, and flute. This is the pack of cards in the hands of the opponent of the “Seibu player”.
- IV Jazz is for piano, drums, and double bass. The simple piano line is made by composing the two voices together. Drums play the whole set of cards.
Algorithm
ca=“collect.sh \\\n”
a=10078970003540
cc=“”
z=“”
b=“”
for i in seq 8 ; do
b=${a}${z}
cc=“${cc} ${a}${z} ${z}${a} \\\n”
z=“${z}1”
done
echo -e $ca $cc > zz
chmod +x zz zz
The collect.sh shell script interprets the input strings as packs of cards and simulates with them “Beggar my Neighbour” games:
collect.sh \
10078970003540 10078970003540
100789700035401 110078970003540
1007897000354011 1110078970003540
10078970003540111 11110078970003540
100789700035401111 111110078970003540
1007897000354011111 1111110078970003540
10078970003540111111 11111110078970003540
100789700035401111111 111111110078970003540
The music generation repository is here. (It is still to be updated with the Beggar-my-neighbour generator...)
Kwaidan's video was produced via Feedpovray. Each part renders a different set of permutation numbers.
The video fragments were created with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -framerate 23.976 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' -i "$1" \
-c:a aac -b:a 128k -c:v libx264 -r 23.976 -pix_fmt yuv420p \
-filter:v "fade=in:st=0:d=5, fade=out:st=$duration:d=5" video.mp4
where “$1” is the audio data.
Finally, I concatenated the videos and added chapters, also via ffmpeg.
Copyright and other information
© Eidon (Eidon@tutanota.com). All rights reserved.
© Eidon. All rights reserved.
If you like this music you might consider following @eidon_channel@open.tube and subscribing to my channel
My blog collects a few of my Grundgestalts.
Kwaidan's videoclip is also available on Open Tube
From 'Black Hair', first episode of the movie 'Kwaidan'