Procedurally generating music from… punctuation?

I did a slightly odd thing that I think is pretty cool.

Long story short, I worked out a way to turn pretty much any bit of text (as long as it has punctuation in it) into a piece of music. It’s a simple-ish process, in the sense that it only requires you to go through and convert two or three punctuation marks at a time into notes by following a couple of simple tables.

The actual working out of the rules is a little complicated-er and honestly completely determines the sound of the track way more than the text itself does. If you assign common punctuation to very crunchy-sounding notes, it’ll become a very jazzy sort of tune! So it’s less a system and more a framework to pop your own system in, to be honest.

Anyway, I’m pretty proud of it, so here’s a video! If you want the full rules to be able to do it yourself, or if you’d like to commission me to create a track based on your own book (or a public domain work you love), hit me up on Twitter @chrisdurstonish.