And here's a description of his 1987 gear from the same chapter:Douglas Adams (from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) wrote:Because he was too tired to think particularly constructively tonight he savagely selected and copied a whole swathe of figures from the spreadsheet at random, pasted them into his own conversion program, which scaled and filtered and manipulated the figures according to his own experimental algorithms, loaded the converted file into Performer, a powerful sequencer program, and played the result through random MIDI channels to whichever synthesisers happened to be on at the moment.
The result was a short burst of the most hideous cacophony, and he stopped it.
He ran the conversion program again, this time instructing it to force-map the pitch values into G minor. This was a utility he was determined in the end to get rid of because he regarded it as cheating. If there was any basis to his firmly held belief that the rhythms and harmonies of music which he found most satisfying could be found in, or at least derived from, the rhythms and harmonies of naturally occurring phenomena, then satisfying forms of modality and intonation should emerge naturally as well, rather than being forced.
For the moment, though, he forced it.
The result was a short burst of the most hideous cacophony in G minor.
Isn't that cool??Douglas Adams (from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) wrote:Three other Macs were connected up via long tangles of cable to an untidy agglomeration of synthesisers -- an Emulator II+ HD sampler, a rack of TX modules, a Prophet VS, a Roland JX 10, a Korg DW8000, an Octapad, a left-handed Synth-Axe MIDI guitar controller, and even an old drum machine stacked up and gathering dust in the corner -- pretty much the works. There was also a small and rarely used cassette tape recorder: all the music was stored in sequencer files on the computers rather than on tape.
