Michael Gogins

I find it essential periodically to re-state my musical goal, so as to clarify just what that goal is and what steps I might follow to attain it.
My goal is to make good music, music that I want to hear and that other people will want to hear. And I want to do this by [...]

This advice assumes you already are a programmer – but that you want to be a much better one! It reflects my own personal methods, and may not work for everyone. Still, I hope you find it helpful. I know that I myself am a much better programmer now than I was when I started, [...]

Heidi and I saw Gerhard Richter’s “Abstract Paintings” at the Marion Goodman Gallery today. The paintings grasped me, and the room tilted this way or that depending on which painting held me in its gaze. Some of them — many of them — are quite colorful and beautiful. On the whole, the room had as [...]

Several years of experience composing in PTV space demonstrates beyond a doubt (to me, at least) that designing score generators to operate in voice-leading and chord spaces has extremely significant long-term artistic potential. I would say that the gamble of work invested has more than paid off as hoped. I would even go so far [...]

Parametric composition is the art of composing music by means of an algorithm whose output can be more or less continuously varied by adjusting a few numerical parameters. If changes in the pieces depend continuously upon changes in the parameters, then related pieces must lie next to each other in the parameter space. Such a [...]

I’m looking at TuneCore… for a pretty reasonable flat fee, you upload music and it appears on digital music stores, including iTunes and eMusic. As far as I can tell, TuneCore and Amazon.com are planning to implement CD publishing-on-demand following the same model.
For the first time in the history of music publishing and distribution, there [...]

I started composing because I saw a snowflake curve in Martin Gardner’s column in the Scientific American, and I thought it would make a cool piano roll.
I have never studied composition, nor have I put in the time to develop the skills required to take elaborate music heard in one’s head and notate it. The [...]

Recently I found that MusicXML has become a de facto standard for exchanging scores between notation software, MIDI files, score viewers, and such.
I am considering adding MusicXML import and export to and from CsoundAC and possibly also Csound itself, using the MusicXML Library.
I am increasingly convinced that one of the major problems  in computer music [...]

My personal view is that computer music is music that can only be made using computers. This implies that a substantial change in human artistic thought and work is indeed possible using computers — and cannot be achieved in any other way.
There may in fact be more than one new mode of thought made possible by [...]