Clear your mind. Sit back. Relax. And write. Write down everything that comes into your mind. Look at everything that comes out spontaneously. This is called automatic writing. The mystics have used it for centuries. William S. Burroughs randomly cut up and pasted together different portions of newspaper stories. Using the same principle, certain evangelicals "speak in tongues." Much of my prose-poetry booklet "Random Elation" by Delmore McElroy (my "writing" pseudonym) was written using this technique. The point of this is that you are going outside of yourself to tap the great source beyond-- the collective unconscious--devoid of ego. Beethoven did it with "Ode to Joy" Most people can hum "Ode to Joy". But how many can hum a melody by Mozart? So I was trying to apply the idea of automatic writing to music. What if you could write a different song for each day--every day would have its own song! So I wrote a computer program that writes music. How did I write a computer program that writes music? Take the C Major scale. If you move the root note up to "G", you're still playing the same notes but it sounds totally different. Why? Because the intervals have changed. Suffice it to say my computer program is based on intervals and intervals of intervals. I've often thought you could write music in 3 dimensions. Vertical would be pitch, horizontal time; so what is the 3rd dimension of music? The quality of the note. Call it volume, timbre, power, expression, emotion. What about time? The notion of pitch associated with a span of time that you can organize and rearrange has always fascinated me. The serialists had the curious notion that pitches and time values over a span of time should be equal. Try writing music like that some time! What does this music sound like? That's exactly what I wanted to find out. I really, in the beginning, had no idea how it would turn out--it was totally up to the gods, the other world, the machine, the collective unconscious, whatever you want to call it. Now I can't say that I didn't get in the way at all. Yes, I had to modify, play with and mess with the raw music. Maybe one day we'll be able to press a button and have a new song a day--but I don't think we're quite there yet. So listen to the results yourself. You be the judge. --Sam Ryan