Music performed by the open internet.
“Music’s structure can be described mathematically. There is art in the math, and there is art in the performance. NetComposer is my exploration of that duality.”
A Composition sets the harmony, structure, and tempo shape. A Performer realizes it from openly licensed audio the crawlers find. Every performance leaves a public record of what was used, where it came from, and who made it.
The record lists every input with its checksum, every setting and the seed, so each performance can be rebuilt exactly.
The C major Prelude, harmony only (after Bach, BWV 846). Composed by Peter from the When in Rome analysis (CC BY-SA 4.0). One chord per bar, 35 bars, 4/4, 69 BPM, broadening over bars 33–35. No notes, no timbres. Composition text.
1 C 2 Dm7/C 3 G7/B 4 C 5 Am/C 6 D7/C 7 G/B 8 Cmaj7/B 9 Am7 10 D7 11 G 12 C#dim7/G 13 Dm/F 14 Bdim7/F 15 C/E 16 Fmaj7/E 17 Dm7 18 G7 19 C 20 C7 21 Fmaj7 22 F#dim7 23 Bdim7/Ab 24 G7 25 C/G 26 G7sus4 27 G7 28 F#dim7/G 29 C/G 30 G7sus4 31 G7 32 C7 33 Dm7/C 34 G7/C 35 C
Chord strikes from musicmatter.art, two per bar. Each strike also plays reversed, swelling into the next. Hall 40%, 24 dB/oct low-pass swept 500 Hz → 20 kHz → 600 Hz.
2:06 · 28 chord recordings by Peter (musicmatter.art)
record: read · json · md
Up/down arpeggios from musicmatter.art, time-stretched to the half bar. 1/4 delay 40% fb, hall 25%, LP 1 kHz 24 dB/oct.
2:09 · 26 arpeggio recordings by Peter (musicmatter.art)
record: read · json · md
Only the chords are fixed. Rhythm and figure contour come from the onsets of sounds the crawler found; notes, beds and bass are found sounds (no pitch-shift). Hall 30%.
2:06 · 38 sounds heard + 6 rhythm donors, from 20 Freesound contributors
record: read · json · md · png
The timbre travels. Each bar's sounds were found by following links from the previous bar's: similar sounds, tags, packs, users, then out to Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive. Rhythm rotates with them. Only the chords are fixed. Hall 30%.
2:06 · 290 sounds, 234 contributors; Freesound 255, Wikimedia Commons 21, Internet Archive 14
record: read · json · md · png
Today the Performer draws on one dedicated Supplier, musicmatter.art, plus open libraries: Freesound, and in the crawl walk also Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive. The wider Supplier network is the ambition. Inputs must be CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, or public domain; never NC, ND, Sampling+, or custom licenses. Time-stretch is allowed; pitch-shifting is not. Records are unsigned for now.
musicmatter.art by Peter Semmelhack is the first NetComposer Supplier: 1,356 lossless sounds (FLAC, 24-bit/48 kHz), 702 chord strikes and 654 up/down arpeggios, across 12 roots and 9 qualities (maj, min, 7, maj7, m7, dim, dim7, aug, sus4), in multiple takes. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.
Machine-readable: an index at musicmatter.art/netcomposer.json lists every sound with its FLAC and a per-sound manifest (/sounds/<name>.nc.json: chord, register and bass, format, sha256, license).
How the Performer uses it: it reads the manifests, picks one sound per bar whose chord matches the Composition, prefers the one whose lowest note is the written bass and whose register sits close to the previous bar, then trims, layers or time-stretches it (never pitch-shifts). Performance 1 uses 28 chord strikes; performance 2 uses 26 arpeggios. Both were read from a local copy of the site, and the audio used is sample-identical to the published FLACs. Performances 3 and 4 do not use it: 3 draws on Freesound, 4 on Freesound, Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive.
All performances and the Composition are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
