Dreaming of Perfect Monsters Program Notes:
My original aim for this work was to pursue my interest in computer-generated algorithmic composition and incorporate it into my non-electroacoustic compositional style. The result is “Dreaming of Perfect Monsters,” which was realized using Heinrich Taube’s GraceCl program and David Psenicka’s FOMUS program.
The inspiration behind the title comes from a variety of sources, but the idea of using a computer to generate the work was in the forefront. The saying, “the computer doesn’t do what I want it to do, it does exactly what I tell it to do,” was in my thoughts throughout the compositional process. There were many times that the program would generate material that was unexpected—sometimes due to a typo, and sometimes due to a miscalculation—but these still yielded very interesting results. This led me to start thinking of these various sections as “troublemaking entities,” thus leading me to refer to them as “monsters”.