Autechre released a MD that was meant for random play or programming the
order of the songs. This was a nice use of the medium because MD players
have enough memory to pick a new random songs while the last is still
playing, then skip to it without interruption, unlike CD players at the
time. On the downside; the MD format only supports 99 tracks per disc.
When I downloaded this Mp3 I was half expecting it to work like one of those
"adventure" books you used to have in the 80's where at the bottom of the
page there would be instructions to "go to page 88 if you want to go into
the hallway, go to page 20 if you want to stay here".
Now, portable MP3 players are quite popular and have lots of memory and no
such silly limit on tracks beyond memory space. We could compile (pun very
much intended) a collection of short spoken pieces with instructions to
manipulate the outside world and/ or skip forward/randomise/repeat tracks.
I'm not sure whether there are portable MP3 players that can also record to
specific tracks, overdubbing them, but if there are then such a compilation
would actually be Turing-complete...
A "compilation of instructions" is quite funny to me as a theme.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Fri Sep 26 2008 - 13:04:44 BST