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Hello! My name is Cortland Mahoney.
I'm a music researcher, software engineer, and producer. I made Story Jam.
This doc is intended to inform you of not just the product, but the centuries of work that have led up to its implementation.
Are you tired of the barriers in traditional music composition? Story Jam is here to break them down.
Designed for anyone with creative ideas — from poets to film directors — our tool offers a new way to create and edit chord progressions, powered by cutting-edge music theory.
*Who Story Jam is for: Storytellers*
Story Jam makes music composition accessible and meaningful to anybody, with or without musical training.
It is designed for those who crave musical control but struggle with traditional composition methods. This includes film directors, slam poets, and self-taught musicians.
Story Jam is not music production software. Do not expect fancy sounds or synthesizers. It's purely a composition tool, designed to spark your creative process.
*Try it out!*
The demo is free on the homepage, no login required!
This is an MVP, so it has an "introductory" feature set. Feature requests welcome; help me build the product you want.
*The chord progression suggestion logic*
This service is built on a novel new music theory I have developed called Monic Theory.
Monic Theory is a rigorous proof for music. Not "Western music": music.
Monic Theory describes the tonal space of any conventional music on earth (except noise music. For that just use `Math.random()`). It describes the static and transient function of chords, instantaneously and differentially over time. This model enables empirical measurement of chords and the relationship between chords.
(hint: It is nothing you have seen in Xenharmonic Alliance. This is a new approach I have been developing over the past 10 years.)
Therefore, Monic Theory enables us to describe (or "predict" if you will) a chord progression to invoke a certain feeling.
*Music Composition*
Three people who helped set up the environment for Monic Theory are composers Paul Hindemith and Harry Partch , and music theorist Heinrich Schenker.
These folks independently contributed new ideas to music composition and analysis. All of these people lived without access to rapid computation. This is critical for the Partch case, as he computed many tables of frequencies by hand to support his compositional technique.
Partch recognized the human-math-music relation in "Genesis of a Music." He includes in this text some samples of his hand-computed tables of frequency values of overtones and (importantly) undertones which support the basis is technique.
Partch's techniques were so far-fetched that he had to construct new instruments to perform his scores. Similarly, I had to build a digital synthesizer to render the output of Monic Theory. (See: https://github.com/ckmahoney/raudio).
*About me*
I was a working composer and violinist from 2007 until 2017, and I have been a software engineer for the past 7.5 years.
I was a volunteer organizer for Livecode.NYC, an NYC livecode community; and am the volunteer creator of Data Dancers, Atlanta's livecode community. I am passionate about algorithmic art and have provided about a dozen workshops over four years on the topic.
https://ckmahoney.github.io/portfolio/posts/livecoding/
thank you for reading.
May the flow of Spices be with you :) naltroc