♫♪  Tom Mudd - Brass Cultures

Brass Cultures finds Tom Mudd at work on algorithmic brass models. Various tubes, valves, and slides of the instrument group simulated. Likewise the playability, even down to subtle variations in lip pressure. A double simulation really, with the winding maze-works of impossible horns played by an automated reasoning. The sounds prompt imagining what forms these structures could physically take, from delicate piping to engine parts, massive Alpine horns to mobile Seussian contraptions, angular devices to rattling cylinders. The album art illustrates such an instrument: a trumpet-thing looking like a complex transport system.

The algorithm makes fine aesthetic choices, its performance varied in pitch and texture. Just as the brass is imagined physically, the playing may be anthropomorphized. Is it improvising? It is learning? Is it playing the room? Funny how we project the physical and the human back onto the results of machine learning. And so in terms of real objects, physical tapes of the brass synthesis are available from fancyyyyy.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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