Almost Real
program notes

"Almost Real" is performed by the virtual Irish folk band living inside my
NeXT machine at home.  The virtual folk band came into existence as a set of
rules (coded as LISP functions) designed to mimic human performace.  The
rules ranged from "physical" constraints (it takes a certain amount of time
for a human to move his/her hand from one position to another) to "meta"
rules governing overall harmonic motion and ensemble characteristics.  It
seems somewhat odd for me to claim that I "composed" this piece, because in
a very real sense I had little to do with the actual note-by-note decisions.
I created the music by invoking the program ("piece-o-matic"), letting it
crank out a number of sound chunks -- perhaps tweaking a few of the rules
between cranks -- and then pasting together the ones I liked.  I hope you
like 'em, too.