Translated: "There's a cat on the gamelan."
In a complete departure for me, I decided that this challenge - many different random number checks, careful timings, and so on - were much better suited to automation than trying to run them myself, so instead of an improvisational approach, I decided that I'd program this instead.
I decided that I'd use ChucK for this - it's well-suited for dynamically adding and removing layers and programatically arranging and synthesizing music.
I started out by stealing bits from the modal-o-matic example; this is a program that randomly plays different configurations of the ModalBar unit generator. The only really salvageable part (for my piece, anyway) was the code that did the different strikes and positions on the virtual bar. Playing around with this, I decided to use a single note (middle C) with different strikes, positions, and presets on every note as an ostinato, and then create dynamic "shreds" that would compute the note timings and durations according to the original plan.
After a few hours of programming, mostly figuring out the timing, I was about to record the final version, when I realized that because this was ChucK, I could actually run six independent copies of the piece at the same time; a couple of takes (every take is different!) and I had the final six-layer version.
Edit: I realized on listening once I was awake that the multiple layers of pulse were obscuring the panning; split the pulsed and no-pulse versions apart and ran six of the no-pulse and one of the pulsed for the final version.
Edit edit: Soundcloud's conversion is sadly covering up the panning in the pulse track. I suggest running it yourself with headphones to get the intended effect.
https://github.com/joemcmahon/ada-kucing-gamelan.ck
More on this 235th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Create a piece of music based on a structure determined by the roll of a single die” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0235/
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