Upgrading Projects

Several changes in ArtSong 6 will impact the algorithmic composition behavior of projects originally created in an earlier version of ArtSong. For this reason ArtSong 6 has been designed such that your earlier version of ArtSong does NOT need to be uninstalled prior to installing ArtSong 6; you can continue to use ArtSong 5 for certain projects should the need arise.

The principal ArtSong 6 changes affecting compositional results of earlier projects are:

• The composition engine, by default, now uses ‘probability’ weighted pitch scales for tonal composition; earlier ArtSong versions used uniformly weighted scales. Setting all pitch class weights to ‘1’ in the composition component/events of a project in ArtSong 6 will produce similar pitch distribution results as ArtSong 5.

• Chords and Scales are now used ‘as defined’ in the chord and resource editors respectively; 2-octave chords are now applied as repeating 2-octave structures rather than collapsing and applying them as uniform 1-octave repeating structures.

• The Track component’s ‘rhythm string’ property has been removed and placed into a new Rhythm Algorithm to make it easier to coordinate rhythms across multiple tracks. Earlier projects using the rhythm string property will need to add an instance of the new Rhythm algorithm and manually transfer the earlier rhythm string. Rhythm string duration coefficients are now base 37 rather than base 10; rests are now indicated by a value of ‘*’ or ‘0’ rather than ‘r’.

• The ‘intrinsic’ arpeggiation/block chord abilities of Track components have been moved to other algorithms to eliminate redundancy and increase the number of compositional options. A new Chord Arpeggiator algorithm has been added to more flexibly produce arpeggios from tracks containing chord data. In addition new options have been added to the Pattern generator algorithms to make it easier to build chord accompaniments from an underlying scale.