acerbasic 7

A E J O T Z

In late '94 I was putting something in the dumpster at work. Someone not from my company had thrown away a PC, monitor, keyboard and a BASIC manual. I fished them out and hooked them up. The computer worked!

The PC was an Acer that was roughly equivalent to an IBM PC-AT. I had little use for a PC but BASIC was installed on the hard drive and BASIC could control the on-board speaker. Muah ha ha...

I already had some basic BASIC skills so I got the rig making random "music" in just a few minutes. Turning to the sound section of the BASIC manual, I began to experiment in earnest.

I still have a dozen cassette tapes of experiments, containing two dozen 30-minute versions. Somewhere I think I still have a CD-R with the BASIC interpreter and a number of different program versions. I don't know if '90s DOS BASIC will even run on my current PC.

This "tune" is a seven-minute edit of a 48+ minute recording I made a couple of years later. I loaded the BASIC interpreter and ran the program on a newer PC, recorded the internal speaker output on a 90 minute Maxell XLII-S, played the recording into the PC sound card to convert to WAV then burned a CD-R.

Whew! My digital life is so much easier now.

The program that generated this "tune" randomizes numerous musical elements but retains certain "proper" musical elements. It's in standard chromatic scales and 4/4 time but it randomly changes key, note duration and some structural characteristics. The program was about 20 lines long, if I remember correctly.

This example is about as sophisticated as the experiments got. Prior versions are less chromatic and/or organized.

acerbasic 7.mp3

Description:

BASIC computer music program from 1995

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