Satiematic

A year ago, I wrote Mood Organ, where I suggested that you could make a version of Philip K. Dick's mood-control device using music. I have an interesting project idea that could work as a kind of Mood Organ, or at least might do something interesting in the emotion-music space. I call the idea Satiematic.

The way it works is you take all of Satie's Gymnopédies, cut them up into individual bars, and tag each of them with an emotion and a list of acceptable transitions to other bars. When you start the Satiematic it would randomly walk along these transitions between bars, but you could also set a target emotion and that would make it tend to transition towards states with that emotion and away from others. Essentially it would compose a version of the music that has more of the emotion you want.

Another dimension for mood, and a good reason for using Satie, is that there are lots of interpretations of the Gymnopédies with very different emotional characters. For example, compare Daniel Varsano's version with the faster rendition by Ciccolini, or Reinbert De Leew's hauntingly slow performance. So I think you could also have some flexibility for mood-setting in the tempo and velocity of the notes themselves.

Whether this would be done by mixing and matching existing recordings or synthesising the music is a bit of an effort-quality tradeoff; recordings would be way easier and sound better, but synthesis would mean you could make a continuous model mapping levels of emotions to note characteristics.

I think it'd be an interesting thing to try; it's already pretty clear that music can influence mood, but it'd be nice to do it in a way that can be finely tuned. Plus, it'd be neat to have an infinite Gymnopédie.