Dunc's AlgoMusic

Update, September 2017: Dunc's AlgoMusic now has a home of its own, courtesy of Maramusine, and as a result, this post is now antiquated. It will stay up for posterity.

Dunc's AlgoMusic doesn't seem to have a devoted page of any sort on the Internet, and only ever seems to be discussed on about 4 different forums. So I decided to give this fun little program its own page on the Internet, in case some soul out there wants to find out more about it.

Dunc's AlgoMusic is a program that procedurely generates a music track from a title either given by the user or culled from a built-in seed. Different strings of text yield different results; while capitalisation does change the track, the order of text does not. Inputting "Studio 934", for instance, will have the same results when typed in as "Sutido 943", but "studio 934" will yield something else entirely. The "instruments" used by Dunc's AlgoMusic are WAVs of different musical notes and percussion included with the program, though these can potentially be replaced.  Music compiled with Dunc's AlgoMusic loops ad nauseum.


From what can be gathered, Dunc's AlgoMusic was created by Mr. Duncan "maramusine" Timiney, whose personal webpages have mostly vanished off the web; his personal Wiki also has a robots.txt preventing it from being recovered by the Wayback Machine. Timiney released Dunc's AlgoMusic as public domain, and even invites users to "do what the hell they like" with it. 

 

That said, Dunc's AlgoMusic is probably most well-known for being used to create the iconic theme tune for Ashens, a web show where Stuart Ashen, "failed psychologist and internet cunt" from Norwich, England, reviews a variety of unusual objects, including food that is years or even decades out of date, shoddy knock-off products, curiosities from variety stores around England, and other similar oddities. Ashens's title tune is taken from the opening notes of Dunc's AlgoMusic's "Doctor Ashen" track. The same track also plays when "Holocentric" is entered.

Download Dunc's AlgoMusic here and get on your way to creating your own music.

Oh, and by the way, my favourite Ashens episode is Easter Tat Special.