Project: Doctor Octave

Possible Title: Dr Octave’s Musical Monstrosity Lab

Based on my doctoral research, DrOctave is a game in which musical constructs are grown from seed and cross pollinated to produce complex original music.

Basically, players compose original music without any knowledge of music theory, by taking little bits they like and growing them into bigger bits they like, guided by nothing more than their own aesthetic sense of what sounds good. The secret sauce is in how I prepackage music theory and structure into “seeds,” “cuttings” and “sprouts”: elements that are natural to the metaphor.

The concept is still maturing, but I believe the lab will have several stations:

• Seed vault: choose fragments from a library
• Germination: grow seeds into larger variants
• Cross breeding: breed new strains by combining old ones
• Flower arranging: organizing final compositions

Other Features

• Evolution time vault - a room where pieces evolve algorithmically and then have to be culled by the doctor/player
• Showcase - a lab visible to other players who can listen to your creations - you get points for every listen, and megapoints for any downloads (clippings taken) (They can’t take entire plants - they can only take cuttings, which are substructures chosen randomly that they can put in their seed vault/cuttings catalog)
• Procedural avatars for each construct - flower designs generated from the same structures that define the music.