My first music video from Bittersweet EP. Enjoy!
Collaborators:
Videography: Douglas Arney
Choreography: Jaret Hughes
or watch on YouTube. (you can change to HD setting, doesn’t always seem to default to that)
This song has a twist… The lyrics of the song make up a running computer program…
I was pondering on this well known quote “programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute” 1 and went ahead and applied it quite literally!
And I may also have been pondering on the wonderful complexity of being human and wishing sometimes we could be as simple as a computer program that ultimately boils down to 1s and 0s, true or false, yes or no…
And you may be wondering what does computer programming has anything to do with music. Well, when I am not creating music, I happen to create software. Somewhere between the musical keyboard and computer keyboard, the two worlds melded.
For the technically minded or just curious, the code/lyrics is available on GitHub.
And last but not least, for all the software engineers and code ninjas out there… Please note this was primarily a musical endeavor rather than a serious software engineering project. The program itself is trivial (prints an ASCII graphic on screen) and, oh my, there is no unit test! So, in this particular instance, please do as I say, not as I do, and test your code!
1 Preface to the First Edition, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Abelson and Sussman