Generated in real-time from random Wikipedia articles, microscale is a web-based, generative album, also available as a rendered physical CDR and digital download. Each article functions a step sequencer – where the letters are the sequencer steps and the track titles are regular expressions that switch the steps on and off. The web version is generated in real-time and is also hackable – the regular expressions, samples, tempo and other parameters can be edited or replaced – enabling microscale to be used as an instrument and sequencer for the listener’s own music.
The concept behind microscale is to show that through transforming one media (text) into another media (music), the meaning can be transformed – the article has its own meaning, but the music generated from the article has a completely different meaning.
microscale is available from http://alestsurko.by/microscale/. The physical version is available as individually rendered CDRs with every disc totally unique.