Graduated from Marlboro!

Graduation was Sunday. Though the weather people were calling for rain all day, it actually turned out to be beautiful weather throughout the whole event, and only spattered a little rain in the late afternoon as everyone was heading home. I was lucky to have a nice assortment of family and friends present, and the whole ordeal seems kind of a blur. It was also my Grandpop's 80th birthday that day, and we took him out to the Chelsea Royal diner for late lunch and a surprise birthday cake.

I'm in Maine now, at least for the next week or so. Plans for the summer are starting to develop, and it's looking like a good time. It feels quite nice to be done with school!

I'm almost done

I had my concert last night, and it seemed to go pretty well. A fair number of people came, and the sound was good in the theater space. It was more difficult than I thought to play computer generated tunes alongside those I've been playing for years. Some were downright awkward. But others were actually quite believable, and to test how believable they really were, I would play set without mentioning what the tunes were, and then ask the audience for a show of hands to see what was composed by whom (or by what). Out of the six CG tunes I played at the concert, alongside a dozen human-composed tunes, about half of them evenly split the audience's opinion. One tune, which I played alongside a hornpipe called The Wren, actually got mistaken for being "fake," and Tune #4 was thought to be "real."

I'm being pressured, now, to make a CD of my computer tunes. That might happen some time this summer.

Concert date: Friday, May 9 @ 8:30 pm

I'll be giving a short concert of Irish fiddle music at Marlboro College on Friday, May 9, beginning at 8:30 pm and probably running just over an hour in length. It's open to the public, so please come. The repertoire will include traditional fiddle tunes, and some computer-generated tunes thrown into the mix -- see if can you guess which ones they are.

Tune generator up and mostly running

I've been working on a "celtic" tune generator for the past several months as a project withing Marlboro's Computer science department. It's a lot of fun, though is has consumed quite a bit of time in the making. This is only a preliminary version of the web site, and showcases just a few of the features my Common Lisp program supports. I'll post links to the code at some point as well. An updated version of the web page should appear by the beginning of May.

http://cs.marlboro.edu/~astimson/tune-generator.

Now it's back to paper-writing.....

-Abe