Home

MAIDENS — Machine Aided New Sounds

What it Is

MAIDENS is a piece of software built by Claudius Iacob, a musician and a programmer, as a by-product of his PhD thesis on algorithmic aspects in musical composition. Its primary aim is to enable an educated art music composer to generate — based on programmable algorithms — partial musical structures, which can be intertwined in a composition. This qualifies MAIDENS as a CAAC (or Computer Aided Algorithmic Composition) software program.

What it Does

The MAIDENS application combines three distinct classes of functionality:

1. musical structures generation: the program produces complete or partial music structures based on configurable algorithms. Other software that tackles this task is, e.g., MAX/MSP, SuperCollider or Csound. As a sidenote, MAIDENS contrasts with all this software by treating the exact algorithms it uses as black boxes, i.e., functional entities end-users never have to touch the inner workings of (and actually couldn't). The most important consequence of this fact is that there is no coding involved in using MAIDENS.

2. music processing: the software operates discrete changes on existing musical material in order to refine or transform it; transposing a bar of music is a common example of such activity. Literally all software providing notation or MIDI editing features also provide some degree of music processing;

3. score notation: despite not being a score notation editor, MAIDENS does provide a minimal set of features that allows the end-user to put together a symbolic music representation, using the western classical notation system (notes on staves). The rationale behind that revolves around two use-cases:

   1. some generators might need/accept user musical input (e.g., a chords generator might accept a soprano line to harmonize); and
   2. user might want to make in-situ, minor adjustments to generated material, in order to better evaluate it before deciding whether it is worth exporting for further processing in a full-scale notation program or DAW. Among other software that provide this class of functionality Sibelius, Finale and MuseScore can be mentioned;

Apart from this core set, the application also provides the common, workflow-related features one would expect from a music editing program:

• it saves and opens files to/from its custom format (*.MAID, a binary file format);
• exports the score to MIDI, abc notation or MusicXML;
• renders an audio preview of the score via exporting it to the WAV format;
• produces a (raw) printable score via exporting projects to PDF.

What to Use it For

The envisioned use of the software entails creating art music by mixing human composition with computer algorithmic generation and/or processing. It is the software's author belief that such a music making approach can lead to new realms of artistic expression, while improving the overall ease, speed and quality of the process.