Risto A. Paju
In 2020 I learned about the Fibonacci word and devised a way to
generate polyphonic music from it. In my five years of making visual
algorithmic art and a lifetime of traditional musicianship, this was
my first foray into algorithmic music. This short film presents the
same method with the Tribonacci word. The first voice plays the
Tribonacci word 0102010010201010201... so that a 0 becomes a rest, a
1 the base note, and a 2 the major second. After a while, the second
voice comes along playing the Nth digit of the word, where N is the
sum of the digits played by the first voice. Furthers voices iterate
on the preceding ones in the same way, and their base notes are
separated by fifths. The sound and visuals are generated and
recorded in real time. The generating software transmits note data
to a synthesizer using MIDI and draws the visualization with OpenGL.