Evan Merz (b. 1981) is a master’s candidate in NIU’s computer music program. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Rochester in 2004. His music has been performed recently in Phono Photo No. 6, Silence, Beauty and Horror 2009, musicBYTES 2009, New Music Hartford, and IMMArts TechArt 2008. His primary interest is biological and bottom-up approaches to computer-assisted composition, which he explores in new algorithmic composition software written in java. Evan works heavily as a freelance composer, scoring for numerous videogames and television productions. He is also the SEAMUS Webmaster and the blogger at computermusicblog.com.

Me and Erin at the zoo

Teaching

At NIU, I teach MUSC 211: Introduction to Electronic and Computer Music.

Becoming

Becoming is an algorithmic composition program written in java, that builds upon some of John Cage’s frequently employed compositional processes. Cage often used the idea of a “gamut” in his compositions. A gamut could be a collection of musical fragments, or a collection of sounds, or a collection of instruments. Often, he would arrange the gamut visually on a graph, then use that graph to piece together the final output of a piece. Early in his career, he often used a set of rules or equations to determine how the output would relate to the graph. Around 1949, during the composition of the piano concerto, he began using chance to decide how music would be assembled from the graph and gamut.

In Becoming, I directly borrow Cage’s gamut and graph concepts. However, I use more complex systems to decide how the music should be assembled. Becoming assembles music using concepts from the AI subfield of swarm intelligence. I place a number of AI “performers” on the graph and, rather than dictating their motions from a top-down rule-based approach, I allow music to grow in a bottom-up fashion based on small decisions made by each performer. Each performer has preferences that determine their movement around the graph. These values dictate how likely the performer is to move at all, how likely the performer is to move by skip or by step, and how likely the performer is to move towards or away from other performers, as well as many other behaviors.

The following pieces were generated with Becoming, using different sound gamuts, and diverse performer settings.

In The Fields

Pittsburgh

Imperceptible Time

Swarm Score Live

Swarm Score Live uses the same concepts as Becoming, but applies them to a live performance setting. So the software generates scores on the fly, based on a gamut of musical fragments, using ideas from swarm intelligence.

Swarm Score

Swarm Score uses the same concepts as Becoming, but generates printed scores using fragments of music notation written in the notation programming language lilypond.

The Tides Remain I
The Tides Remain II

Tribute

I recently completed another piece of software that allows the user to generate a sound collage for a person’s life. It takes many sound files as input, then uses granular synthesis and evolutionary algorithms to create a moving sound portrait. One of the first large scale renders of the software is called The Sound Life of Gebhart J Reiling 1926 - 2007. It uses sounds that occurred during my grandfather’s life.

Other Software

I’ve also written a procedural, interactive suite for Pure Data and the Korg nanoKontrol. The suite is made up of Manifest Destiny 1, Manifest Destiny 2 and Manifest Destiny 3. You can find the source code for the suite here, and I also uploaded the code for using the Korg nanoKontrol in Pure Data.

The drum kit that I wrote for the wiimote made a splash when it was launched just a few weeks after the release of the Wii.

Commercial Scoring

Since 2006, I have written and recorded the scores for a number of videogames, including:

Exploit by Gregory Weir
Arrow of Time by the Super Flash Brothers
Creekwood Forest by the Super Flash Brothers
The Mold Fairy by Gregory Weir
James the Super Zebra by the Super Flash Brothers

I also composed the score for the animated web show Dad’s Got Ninjas.

In 2007, I wrote a suite of music for the million-selling game AudioSurf. Since AudioSurf generates race tracks based on music files, I was able to write five pieces of music that generate specific courses. The music was written up in PC Gamer magazine.

PC Gamer Article on Suite for AudioSurf by Evan X. Merz