A quick heads-up that I’ll be playing my first ever proper not-just-an-open-mic gig this Thursday night as part of the Date Horse comedy and music night at the Vauxhall Griffin, London. Come along for some silly songs about Paris Hilton’s pet monkey and much more (and RSVP on the Facebook event)…

So far it only implements a subset of the possible sample effects, and it demands a very fast Javascript engine – luckily all the new breed of browsers are pretty competitive at that now. Even so, unless your CPU is an absolute behemoth, it’ll probably struggle to keep up – the audio output is fixed at 44100Hz, and that’s rather a lot of numbers for Javascript to crunch, especially when the MOD file gets up to 16 or more channels. Which, amusingly enough, is exactly the situation we had back when we were using Gravis Ultrasounds on 386es. Hurrah for progress!

Update 2010-06-08: Oops. In the process of testing how Safari 5 shapes up, I discovered a rather silly oversight: the audio buffering routine was set up to never use more than 10% of CPU. Now that I’ve fixed it, it turns out that Chrome and Safari (at least) have no trouble at all playing Jugi’s Dope theme in its 28-channel glory. (However, taking the brakes off the buffering does mean that we can’t reliably pause the audio any more. A small price to pay, I think you’ll agree.)

(continues for approx 1500 more lines)

Anyone typing it in in its entirety would be rewarded with this:

Download midibeep_minute_waltz.mp3

Not bad for an evening’s work. Mind you, I did take an ever so teeny shortcut, by writing a Ruby program to convert a MIDI file to BEEP format. (Any .mid file will do, although ones with a single instrument will survive the rather primitive selective-note-butchering process better. Oh, and anything much longer than this one will exceed the 48K Spectrum memory…) And now you can try it out too:

• Midibeep source/downloads at Github
• Midibeep Windows build (thanks to Karl McNeil)
• Minute Waltz (TAP, 38K)

Update 2010-05-26: Karl McNeil has adapted Midibeep into a variant called Mid2ASM, which outputs an assembler listing rather than Basic – this enables the data to be packed much more efficiently, paving the way for altogether longer pieces of music. Download Mid2ASM (453K, Windows EXE included)

Update 2010-06-02: Another update from Karl, featuring a Windows GUI, more space-saving tweaks, and embedding the output in a Basic REM statement. Download Mid2ASM v2 (3.4Mb)

This makes it a good excuse for some experimentation with generative music. The secret is in the scale – it’s equivalent to playing only the black notes on a piano, and presumably has roots in oriental music (I previously rediscovered it while working on Haiku). To make it into something like a proper demo, rather than just a throwaway routine, I added a bit of subtle progression Cyberpunks Unity style, so it drifts in and out of randomness as the graphical effects change. It even has a proper ending…

In recent months Yerzmyey has been pushing for the revival of the 16K Speccy as a platform, so I’m pleased to announce that this demo is – so we believe – the third ever demo to run on it.

• Download Spectrumori-on (TAP, 4Kb)
• Spectrumori-on on Pouet

• Download Ode To Claire
• Ode To Claire on Pouet

On the musical front, Snakebite is a chiptune with a middle-eastern vibe, modelled after every Turkish Eurovision entry ever. It got third place in the competition, and originally they weren’t going to give out a third prize, but they had some spare food left over on the Saturday night, so I won a jar of sausages. Best. Prize. Ever.

Download gasman_-_snakebite.mp3

• Download Snakebite – MP3 (2.5Mb)
• Download Snakebite – STC (5.1Kb)

Download matt_westcott_-_paris_hilton_and_her_monkey_-_bookbinders.mp3

There was a girl with a million dollar smile
and a million dollar reason why
Everybody loved her
Everybody loved her style

Her agent had been telling her for a while
that in order to enhance her media profile
she should sponsor a panda
or an orphan from Rwanda
Show her caring side

But due to an unfortunate mixup
too convoluted to go into here
she received a monkey
by overnight delivery
and now it’s crystal clear

Paris Hilton and her monkey
They’re gonna be the best of friends
She wants to call him Trevor
and when they’re both together
The fun and games will never end
Paris Hilton and her monkey
They go to all the best parties
They’re seeking out the open-minded nightclubs
that don’t have a No Monkeys policy

They’re going off on a great escape
in search of shoe shops and banana milkshake
cause he’s a cheeky monkey
and she’s too frisky to mention

The paparazzi follow them with glee
As they watch them swing from tree to tree
Until she chips a fingernail
and has to call for medical attention

Paris and Trevor forever
So innocent and carefree
Beautiful and happy
the modern-day epitome
of everything I’d like to be

except for all the sex tapes and drunk driving offences

[Chorus]

Download The Model (MP3, 4.7Mb)

Download matt_westcott_-_everything_is_relative.mp3
This started out as an instrumental track laid down at Shucon 2008 on TDM’s GarageBand / MIDI setup, which came back to bite me as a nasty bit of vendor lock-in. (I figured that since GarageBand took MIDI input and stored it as MIDI-like note events, I’d be able to export it to a .mid file, right? Silly me.) Luckily I managed to salvage / re-record enough of it to work on it some more and develop it into a proper song. Spurred on by some particularly eclectic music competitions at Assembly, I decided to try my luck at entering it at Evoke, just to see what would happen when it was thrown in against a whole load of D+B and trance tracks. Not surprisingly, it failed to qualify. But having done the rounds of more or less the entire summer demo party season, it found a home at Sundown 2008, where it got 4th place. Score!

The lyrics were actually sparked by the train journey back from Shucon – at the seat in front of me, I saw that someone had drawn some initials in a heart on the window. This made me think “eww, that’s a bit tacky. Oh, hang on – whoever did that drew it on the outside of the window but did it in mirror writing so his girlfriend on the train could read it. Aww, that’s like the most romantic thing ever!”

Edgware Road

Download matt_westcott_-_edgware_road.mp3
A slightly more obviously train-related song, written to immortalise that enigma of the London Underground where time stands still, and add to the repertoire of songs about tube stations. Lyrics were mostly written on the Eurostar (hence the namecheck in the bridge) and the recording was done a-cappella stylee in the cabin of a sleeper train on the way back from International Vodka Party. Naturally, this was a horrible painstaking process of waiting for the moments when the train wasn’t making an absolute racket, but it had to be done for posterity. How many other songs have been written and recorded entirely on public transport, eh?

Cabbage Soup For The Soul

Download matt_westcott_-_cabbage_soup_for_the_soul.mp3
Written for Hoopshank as part of intense negotiations (not really) over contributing to another as yet unannounced musical project. He demanded songs of cabbage… I answered the call. I added a self-imposed constraint that the song had to have a mostly-serious message, so I came up with the idea of cabbage soup for the soul, as being something like Chicken Soup for the Soul but not as pleasant, and better for you. And suitable for vegans. And with that, the song just wrote itself. Or, more accurately, was written on my behalf by my alter ego, fictional Scottish indie band Glencoe Horse.

At The River (slight return)

Download matt_westcott_-_at_the_river_slight_return.mp3
OK, scraping the barrel a bit here. But you can’t really blame me for having a sudden bout of obsessive-compulsive disorder on realising that the lyrics to At The River by Groove Armada consist entirely of a half-sentence that trails off unsettlingly without completing its train of thought. “If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there,” – then… what exactly? Clearly, this had to be fixed. So I did.

(All songs downloadable from the not-very-pretty music.matt.west.co.tt – lyrics available from my 50/90 profile)

This time, with two or three days left before Assembly and nothing to show, I decided to make it easy on myself, and stick with what I know – the primal boop-durr-tish-durr bassline, the crowd-pleasing echoing cascades – and not be too bothered about basking in my signature style. As a result, it’s not the most original piece of music I’ve ever written, but it did its job – it made first place in the Extreme Music competition where it was up against PC soft-synths in addition to the now familiar Commodores and Nintendos.

The title isn’t a bid to stir up controversy with drug references, by the way. I just liked the combination of words.

Download gasman_-_spacecake.mp3

• Download Spacecake (MP3, 4.3Mb)
• Download Spacecake (TAP, 5Kb)