Clara Empricost

Clara Empricost stands for “Condition List Action Rejection Algorithm for the Evaluation of Music at Pseudo-Random Idea COnstruction STage”.  It is a C++ program that is supposed to generate music.  I wrote it at school in 1996 as an experiment; it generated some interest in the now-defunct Cambridge University New Music Society toward the end of 1997 and has since been featured in a Generative Creativity course at Sussex University.

Result of 1996 experiment, running for about a week on spare processor cycles of a network of 25MHz DOS PCs at RNIB New College Worcester:

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Another canzona generated on three Linux machines at Cambridge University in January 2001 (someone asked me to get the thing going again)

Another canzona

The quality of MIDI files will depend to a large extent on that of your sound card or MIDI playing equipment.

In 2023 I was invited to give a short talk on copyright of AI art at the Oxford China Forum and demonstrated this; they posted the video on the YouTube platform. The more interesting Q&A section was also recorded but I don’t know where.

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