Hi - I`m a composer by training - but I`ve always been interested in technology (perhaps the most generic statement of intent I could give, but a true one). At the moment I`m writing an opera about a woman who decides to submit the control of her life to algorithms. She does this in order to generate infinite novelty for herself - the algorithm takes previous experiences she`s had, processes them and gives them back to her. It makes her decisions for her, at first by just giving her as an instruction the optimal result of its calculations, based on maximising certain outputs, and then by actually physically moving her body around, so she becomes a kind of spectator to her own actions. The technology deepens as you might expect, requiring further and further information to continue to produce new experiences, and new arrangements of limbs. It starts colonising her thoughts and feelings, etc., manipulating them into all kinds of new arrangements. And then there`s the end, which I won`t spoil here. So far, so dis/utopian sci-fi. However, pursuing the idea of the opera as a total artwork, and the idea of the algorithms as a universal organisation tool, I decided that I wanted to make parts of my life (by which I mean certain blocks of time, rather than certain dimensions) operate along similar procedures to my character. I must say that I find the kind of highly rationalised and yet not immediately obvious organisation that algorithms produce a seductive mode of organisation for life. I have only a very limited grasp of how to do this. At the moment the idea is to take average durations of certain activities that I do, each with various parameters such as location, and record them in the data-medium I am most familiar with as a musician, namely MIDI notes. This parametric data is then analysed into Markov chains, which give the weighted probability of a particular activity following a particular other one. The various parameters are presented, decoupled, as streams of MIDI notes, each of which triggers a short sound file which gives me a particular instruction. So far so simple. My specific problem at the moment is that I want to eventually integrate feedback into the system, in the form of yes/no responses to instructions, but don`t want to be stuck using a language that doesn`t allow that kind of thing. Any input from vastly more technically literate people would be extremely highly appreciated.
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