Notes on Goodbye My Friend

Writing and production history

This song was written in May, 2019 as a farewell to Tom Hedges who died in November of 2007. I worked with him for 30 years and we became business partners at Fractal Design, where we created Painter, ImageStudio, ColorStudio, and other great products. The song is all guitars, bass, and drums (aside from vocals). Tom was a Beatles fan, and he liked John Lennon. Lennon mainly respected rock songs that used the traditional rock instruments, so that's why I arranged the song this way. I also altered my voice like Lennon, who always wanted something different. The song chronicles many memories, and tries hard to show how much he influenced me.

It starts with a chorus, with the drum setting the tempo and an iconic guitar riff, subtly fuzzed. In the background are some descending chromatic vocals. Slow arpeggiations on a clean guitar trace out the harmony in a wistful way while the drum fills get your attention.

The first verse sets the scene. He was, at first, my mentor, but eventually I took over as lead coder. Apps took over in importance and salability. The B-section of the first verse chronicles our relationship - we fought over lots of things but always somehow remembered to be friends the next day.

The second verse talks about how we were the progenitors of our software Apps. But we didn’t write them all — others helped write them like John Derry (UI and brushes), Bob Lansdon (watercolors), Priscilla Shih (general coding), Shelby Moore (PC version, multi-point color fills), Glenn Reid (R&D Management), Christina Hall (general coding), Vahe Avedissian (general coding), Scott Cooper (general coding), Erik Johnson (general coding), and our Ray Dream friends, Damien Saint-Macary (web features), François Huet (web features), and Nicholas Barry (Web features). These were the people that actually touched the code (and there were a few more I can’t recall). These were “our loyal crew”. And they were awesome!

But our loyal crew also consisted of a few more people who were instrumental to the development of the complex software base. For instance, Michael Cinque, who headed QA and Steve Rathmann, an early hire that always adapted to the task.

In the B-section of the second verse, the tale of difficulties competing against the software giant Adobe gets told. We fought the Painter fight ten years. All through the time, Tom’s health got worse and worse. He was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1989, went into remission, had it flare up in 1995, and went into remission again. However, his radiation therapy treatments ended up creating a spreading neuropathy that started with his hands, and eventually affected his lower arms, and then his whole arms (by 2005) and finally his lungs.

We believe what caused this was his brief tenure as KSJO’s chief engineer. He spent a lot of time in the Optimod room up near the peak of Mt. Hamilton, where their radio antennas and microwave transmitters resided. I went in there once (but only once). You could literally feel the radiation.

KSJO's Antenna Tower - Next to the Optimod shack

He also had a spectacular lack of good luck with the women in his life. And I’ll say no more about that (for now).

Reprise references

The reprise from this song contains a dozen references to arcana from Tom’s life and the time we shared. Here, I’ll pick it apart, line by line.

Remember the days in Boston town

Tom and I were Fractal Software, a partnership, in 1986-1989, with Letraset as our marketers. We often traveled to Boston for the MacWorld East show, to show our product. Letraset had demo artists and a medium-sized booth. Later on, Fractal Design, the company that Tom and I had a hand in founding (along with Steve Manousos, Lee Lorenzen, and Steve Thomas), had a much larger booth presence. Tom and I would arrive in August in Boston, set up shop in a nice hotel, hit the bar, and wait for the other people showing products to arrive. It became a growth period for both of us.

Remember the day we lost our friend

Bob Lansdon was our odd friend from academia. He was constantly in search of a PhD in math. There was no doubt he was smart. Bob introduced me to Fourier transforms, and taught me how to vary the phase of the frequency signal, an incredibly useful trick. He and I dreamt of laser interferometry for measuring paper surface texture. Bob wrote the first watercolor capability in Painter. One day in 1994, Bob came into Fractal Design the office on Spreckels Drive in Aptos, and into the suite where Tom, John Derry, and I had our desks, and we talked for a bit. He had completed his PhD, finally after all these years (his thesis advisor was Ralph Abraham). We were a busy group and he left. A few days later we learned of his suicide. When I announced it to the new at Fractal, that was one of the few times I actually cried in front of the company I ran.

Remember how Water Tank went down

In the early 1990s, Tom was married to Joanne Etheridge (née Stoner) and they became a couple. They had two kids, Colin and Broghan. By the late 1990s, the relationship between Tom and Joanne was strained for a reason I never knew. It might have been Tom’s personality, which was a wee bit crude for many people’s taste. I don’t know. But there was a point where Joanne hired her parents, both real estate agents, to get them a second home. They bought a house on Water Tank Road in La Selva. To me as an observer, I felt that their strained relations, compounded with the fact that Joanne was literally creating a bachelor pad for Tom, meant that they were headed for divorce. But somehow Tom never saw it.

Remember the goldfish bowl and then

WhenI first met Tom Hedges at Calma Company in 1974, he was an RA at Stanford with his first wife, Rabbit (I never learned her name). So he came in late because those were his remaining working hours. I had been hired at Calma (at 4 bucks an hour, by Art Collmeyer) as an applications programmer for a new APL-based language (called GPL) that Carl Smith was creating. I needed a real workstation to do the work I was doing (which usually involved not doing what I was supposed to do). I was working on a demo of a rotating dodecahedron with hidden lines suppressed that ran on a Tektronix storage scope. One night Tom and Bruce Holloway, high as a kite, entered the demo area at Calma, which was surrounded by glass, and hence its name “the goldfish bowl”. They hopped on to the wheeled chairs and scooted themselves across the demo space, very close to me, and said “boo!”. I barely looked up from my code, which irked them a tiny bit. But they just kept abusing the 5-wheeled chairs, skating to and fro. It was a funny time for me, to be sure.

Remember the wall-sized plots we made

Tom introduced me to Bob Lansdon as a one time co-resident of Ruddock house in their days at Caltech. I myself was a Page house resident, but a few years later on. Bob was a shy nerd who rarely spoke. But he knew his math. At Calma one night, with access to a brand new Versatec raster printer, with four-foot-wide rolls of paper, they decided to make a plot. Tom suggested that the plot be of a nice mathematical function. Bob suggested a Fourier transform of a set of points on the unit circle (I think it was 9-point). A gigantic plot was produced and it hung on the walls for a time. I've recreated the plot here.

The end of your set you played that song

Tom worked for KZSU, the Stanford radio station as a DJ for a while in the 1970s. He divorced his first wife Rabbit (she was unfaithful to him I heard) and married Carolyn Foster. At the end of his DJ set at KZSU, Tom always played a song “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond as a tribute to her.

Remember how partner’s draw was great

Tom and I were partners in Fractal Software from 1985 to 1990. When we got Letraset as a marketer was when we met Marla Milne, a product manager from Soho in New York. She spotted my demo of Gray Paint at a party thrown by Marc Canter. Once we built our first image editing App, ImageStudio, the royalty checks started coming in once a quarter. When they arrived, we deposited the check and then each drew out half of the check in “partner’s draw”. We bought houses on those checks and bought our first BMWs.

Remember how Cheshire cowed your dog

Tom and Caroline had a large German Shepherd mix, Pokey. It was a huge dog. One day they came to visit me and Ruth Zimmer (née Rasmussen), my second wife at our house in Evergreen. Ruth’s old black cat was named Cheshire and it was, let’s say, a bit strong-willed. Once Pokey came through the door, Cheshire pounced! Cheshire, with one tenth the body mass of Pokey, soon had Pokey literally cowering in the corner by the door. Poor dog!

Remember the Gershwin rhapsody

Tom’s dad, who had passed by the time we became partners in Fractal Software, was an avid pianist. He often played the Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue. When Tom and I met Ed Bogas (Steve Capps introduced us, I think) and his crew of musicians and programmers in the mid-1980s (including Neil Cormia and Ty Roberts), we both got interested in the possibilities of music and computers. We were tasked to sample a piano, so we did exactly that and produced an 88-key set of sound samples. I had created a program that could play MIDI format, triggering sound samples, and mimicking the sustain pedal and Tom laboriously keyed in the Gershwin Rhapsody so we could play it back. He also keyed in Wasted on the Way by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. With the Rhapsody, I think Tom was literally constructing a tribute to his Dad.

Remember when Painter saved the day

Tom and I had both profited from ImageStudio and ColorStudio, both Letraset-branded products, because we received royalties from their international sales. One day in 1990, we got a call from Letraset’s General Manager Jack Forbes who told us they were getting out of the software business in North America. I had been working on Painter for 11 months at my home (in secret). I chose that day to introduce it to Tom. He and I both thought it had definite possibilities, so we contacted some friends and started Fractal Design.

Remember the exit strategy

Tom, John, and I worked on Painter for nearly ten years. The board of directors had hired me back as CEO (of MetaCreations) and ordered me to sell off the software. Which I proceeded to do. It was an unpleasant time for me. But as it happened, we sold Painter and associated products to Corel and set up a consulting gig with them for the three of us. That was our exit strategy. It wasn’t planned.

Remember neuropathy’s dismay

All through our time when Fractal Design was in Scotts Valley, Tom Hedges began experiencing neuropathy in his hands. This was a result of his radiation therapy in 1898 for Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, an aggressive cancer. Unfortunately his radiation therapy had to be concentrated on his lymph nodes in his neck. At first he had problems typing. Now, Tom was always a two-finger typist to begin with. Eventually it cost him his productivity. Later on, it cost him the use of his arms.

Remember the picture Marla made

In 1985, we built ImageStudio, to be distributed by Letraset. Marla Milne was our product manager. Tom had a picture of his family. Tom also had a chipped tooth. Marla, as a joke, scanned that image and applied Tom’s chipped tooth to all his other family members. When I saw it, I had a laugh for about an hour. What a crazy, disrespectful idea. After I had my laugh, I said “Bummer, man” to Tom and resumed my coding. It was a thing we did. The funny thing was that Tom had that chipped tooth fixed within a week.

Remember the sadness near the end

On Tom’s 57th birthday. He had a small gathering in his local pub, CB Hannigan’s. Tom’s arms hung limp at his sides because of his neuropathy. He and I spoke for fifteen minutes or so. His situation was not good since his lungs’ function was finally being impaired by his neuropathy. I listened to his situation and gave my final “Bummer, man” to him. He smiled (the only time that day I saw a smile from Tom) and we drank our beers. Mine was from a mug. His was from a tall glass with a long straw. It was a sad moment.

Remember the time you were betrayed

Really it was the “times” he was betrayed. But this line is referring to his months-long relationship with a woman known as “Yolanda”. She wasn’t straight with him. He took her to Tahiti on one vacation I remember, and lavished her with jewels and such. But as It turned out, she had never left her relationship with her previous boyfriend and actually brought him with them on the pretext of scuba training (for her). Later, when he wised up, he had a detective discover that she was still seeing him, with pictures and all. And that was it.

Remember I’ll always be your friend

Goodbye old friend.

Lyrics

Goodbye My Friend

Goodbye my friend

I said goodbye my friend

Though your time is gone

I look back upon

All those years we spent together

Working on and on

You were outta sight

And you taught me right

When you handed me the reins

I drove on through the night

Day by day

We learned to get along

Along the way

We remained strong

We both wrote the song

Others sang along

You know, even when the earth moved

We kept on keepin’ on

We worked to create

And our stuff was great

Yes our loyal crew was awesome

When they stepped up to the plate

Year by year

We fought the hardest fights

Have no fear

Soon comes the night

Goodbye my friend

Goodbye my friend

Goodbye my friend

I said goodbye my friend

Too much time in the radio station

Took its toll out on you

And even so it never made you blue

Too much trust in the ladies that found you

Left a few scars on you

Too bad that none of them could be true

Goodbye my friend

Goodbye my friend

Goodbye my friend

I said goodbye my friend

(Reprise)

Remember the days in Boston town

Remember the day we lost our friend

Remember how Water Tank went down

Remember the goldfish bowl and then

Remember the wall-sized plots we made

The end of your set you played that song

Remember how partner’s draw was great

Remember how Cheshire cowed your dog

Remember the Gershwin rhapsody

Remember when Painter saved the day

Remember the exit strategy

Remember neuropathy’s dismay

Remember the picture Marla made

Remember the sadness near the end

Remember the time you were betrayed

Remember I’ll always be your friend

Thinking Backwards

Most of us naturally think of time as an arrow that always points from the past to the future. This is why it might be so difficult for us to think backwards. But, you might ask, why do it? There are reasons, and some of them are not only compelling, but also fundamentally necessary to our way of life.

When I write code, bugs inevitably happen. Bugs are unforeseen problems that result in a crash or some other detectable error. And there I am, in the debugger, looking at the error. So I have to think backwards: given that this happened, what could have caused it? There are only so many possibilities. As we rule them out, whatever is left, however improbable, is the answer. This allows us to catch the problem before it happens, and then we can trace backwards from that problem using the same sequence of deduction. This proceeds backwards in causality until we find the source of the problem: generally the small wrong thing that snowballed into the error or the crash.

Imagine a homicide detective, presented with a dead body. Or a National Transportation Safety Board inspector at a plane crash site. What begins innocuously as debugging becomes a troubleshooting process that can apply to a much more dramatic and even fatal series of events. Events which must be traced back to their root cause so we can figure out how to prevent them from happening again and continue to believe that the world is safe.

But there are creative reasons to think backwards as well. And these are also more than simply exercises for our minds.

Distortion Filters

The filters in PhotoBooth and other Core Image applications often allow us to distort images in interesting ways, like a fun-house mirror.

Once you have learned analytic geometry and also exercise a bit of creativity, it is relatively easy to develop a function that can, for instance, create a bulge in an image.

A circular bulge like the one that makes my nose way too big is a piecewise mathematical function that conceptually takes a point in the source and transforms it into a point in the destination.

To do this, we envision a circle or radius R about the center O of the distortion. Point P may lay inside the circle, and we create a vector V from O to P (which is simply P - O). Note that the vector actually has two components, an x and a y component.

With this in mind, we can build up the distortion as a function based on these things. For instance, we can compute the length of V, and this we will call D. A function that goes from 0 at the origin O to 1 at radius R is simply evaluated by f = D/R. Actually we want f to be 1 outside the circle, so f = min(D/R, 1). And we want f to be a smooth function as well, so we might want f = 3*f*f - 2*f*f*f (in other words three f squared minus two f cubed, which is the smoothstep function).

To create a distortion, we must alter the scale of the image. To increase the size in the center, we want the scale to be greater than 1, and to make the distortion mesh with the undistorted image at the edge, we want the scale to be exactly 1 at radius R. If we call the bulge factor at the center B (B is 1.5 or so at the center of the distorted image above), then we can define the scale of the distortion to be s = B + (1-B)*f. This arranges the scale to be B at the center O and it will smoothly transition to 1 at radius R from O.

And the distortion itself becomes P' = O + s*V. In other words we are scaling the vector displacement from O by the transitioning scale factor s. Since s becomes 1 at radius R and beyond, the image is left undistorted outside the circle of effect.

But wait, we have made a huge error! It turns out that we are evaluating each point of the destination and we need to map back to the source! So we need to think backwards to get to the source point from a point in the destination.

Well, we don't actually need to do that, it turns out. We can fake it by simply making the scale less than one at the center to make the bulge get bigger, and correspondingly make the scale greater than one at the center to make the bulge a pinch instead.

You see, all distortion filters work this way: they must work backwards from a point in the destination to a point in the source. This makes it an exercise in thinking backwards.

Backwards Guitar

When writing the song Not Enough Time (listen to it on soundcloud.com), I decided to make the second round solo an exercise in backwards guitar (which is at 1:29 in the song). To construct this, I had to do several things backwards. First, I had to create a time-reversed version of the song. Then I had to listen to it backwards and jam to the appropriate section of it until I had a basic idea of what I wanted the solo to sound like. This had to mesh with the forwards version, and so I constrained the start and the end notes to what I wanted to hear in the forwards version.

Sounds easy so far, right? Well, continuing, I mapped out the chords of the round, which is repeated twice, and reversed them. I have to say that the chords do sound eerie backwards because cadences are not what we expect them to be.

In fact, listening to and jamming to a backwards song is very unsettling. You feel like you are in a different world while you are doing it.

I recorded three solos in all, and then I reversed them again back into forwards time. Each one was then played with the song in its normal form. One sounded best, so I kept it.

Whew! Thinking backwards takes a lot of preparation in this case, and it's not an easy thing to do.

This all goes to show that thinking backwards is actually more useful than it appears at first thought. And our world is immeasurably better because we can do it.

Piano Improv

Software development can cause frustration: large projects run over, thorny problems seem intractable, bugs can be hard to find, leading to hours of hard, painstaking logical analysis.

And that's why I like to turn to music to gain perspective.

You can check out my relationship with music in my blog post, Music. You can learn a little bit about how I write songs in my blog post, Writing Songs. And now I will share with you some of the ways I create music ad libitum.

Years of Piano Playing

I taught myself to play the piano in 1973 and this led to years of constant obsession with piano-playing. I went through the catalogs of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and many other artists. But most of all, I learned to improvise.

I once read that Ludwig Van Beethoven was a master improviser. He could sit at the Hammerklavier and spin tales of music directly from his touch. I always found his music to be inspiring. I also read that Johann Sebastian Bach was a genius at improvisation. And also Schubert, Mozart, Franz Liszt, and others.

In 1973 I wondered if I could ever learn to do that. Just touching the keys of the piano that my parents had bought for my sister Susan to learn piano, but which she had rejected after a few lessons, I saw a tremendous regularity. A devilish simplicity and yet a complexity that defied simple rigorous analysis.

So in that summer when I was left alone in the house in Sunnyvale while the rest of the family went to New Mexico, I had nothing but time to myself.

I have mentioned that the upright piano we had was painted puke green and was tuned a half-semitone flat. The strings were too old to make them any sharper, which would require making them tighter. So it got tuned more flat so all the strings could at least be in tune with each other.

And when you teach yourself notes on such a piano, you can forget about having perfect pitch.

After going to college at Caltech, I found a piano in the practice room in Page house. I played it incessantly. And my abilities improved immediately. The quality of the instrument makes a huge difference, I found.

When I went to UC Berkeley in late 1975, it was as a music major, as I have mentioned. But in between assignments, I improvised. Sometimes 8 hours a day. This is what I meant by obsession.

There were a few years when I had to work and push the piano-playing aside, but I always returned to it. There was always just too much value to it, emotionally and intellectually. It's probably good I did, too, given the frustration capacity for the profession I finally landed in.

I played piano wherever I could find one. I found that the Yamahas and the Kawais were the best pianos. And in that generation, this was true. I played a Bösendorfer once, but I found it to be stiff and unexpressive. I also played Steinways but found them to be unremarkable and sometimes quite muddy. In retrospect, it was probably just how well they were tuned.

In the early 1980s I was improvising quite a bit, with quite a varied style. A little modern, a little freestyle. You can check out the following improvisation to see what I was playing like in September 1981. often my improvs are titled based on the date they were recorded, in this case 09-22-81 #1 shows it was the first recording I did on the 22nd of September, 1981.


As the 80s wore on, I continued to play and write pieces. Here is another improvisation that I worked into a full-blown piano piece, called Black Widow. This piece is much more structured and rhythmically interesting. My style was progressing.


Eventually in the late 1980s I got the Yamaha 7-footer that I use today. I also had, for a while, a Yamaha 7-foot Diskclavier, but I didn't like the way it worked. Yes, I had two grand pianos for a while. I'm serious about pianos, and I probably always will be. But I also worked with synthesizers. Including a weighted-key synthesizer that still works great after so many years, the Roland RD-500. Supposedly it was a roadie's dream because it was so stable and bulletproof. As a digital piano, it also featured various kinds of electric piano styles. In 1990, I played the following improvisation. This was when I was about two months into the secret work on Painter, before another living soul saw what I was cooking up. It is interesting to see the sonorous moods I had in those periods. This improvisation does a lot to tell you the story behind my early work on Painter: intricate, creative, and spontaneous. It's called 11-10-90 #2. Note: sometimes I recorded more than one improv a day, if I was on a roll.


My improvisation recordings are entirely unedited, so if I make a mistake: it's all on me!

Also from this era is an improvisation that features more interesting rhythm but also a melodic inner section that has a quote from one of my songs from the era (which I no longer have a recording of) called keys to your heart. It's not bad. It's called e piano improv, a rather undescriptive title it's true.


When I moved out by the beach, for a while I had a house with room for two pianos. It was there that I did most of my modern production work with ProTools. But I continued to improvise. Even in a smaller, more manageable house I still have a 7-foot grand. And I play piano every day. When I'm writing songs, I will improvise on the theme of the song. Usually I will work up the song and record it onto my iPhone which at least gets it down for posterity. My worst problem is that I don't record the songs that I compose from day to day.

So, the nature of improvisation is that most of it goes unrecorded, which is a pity when I do a particularly brilliant one. So maybe one in twenty gets recorded.

After 39 years of piano-playing, my fingers and my brain are entirely in sync. Does this mean every note is perfect? No. But it does mean that I can maintain a rhythm while modulating from key to key. All the chords have familiar hand shapes, so I don't really look at the keys any more. Sometimes I play in the dark, but usually only when I am alone.

How I Improvise

So, how do I do it? What is going through my mind when I'm playing?

If you were to watch, you would just see me sit down and play.

With my hands on the keyboard, I focus first on the key I'm playing in. And whether or not I want to start on a chord that is moving or stable. Moving chords are like sevenths: minor sevenths, major sevenths, inversions (particularly those with the seventh in the bass). This is because sevenths typically resolve into more plain chords in a cadence. Here we have an A minor seventh chord resolving into a D major chord. These chords also have very natural hand shapes to me, and I favor them. But, of course, they can be expressed in any key and their hand shapes might be a bit different. Also, suspended fourths are unstable, and tend to resolve fairly quickly.

Playing in different keys is important. At one point, in in the mid-80s, I forced myself to improvise in a different key each time I sat down at the piano. I had a little tally sheet. J S Bach used to do this, I suspect, since his Well-Tempered Clavier has two books with a piece in every key. Fréderic Chopin also did this with his Preludes and Études.

Anyway, it's also important to try out a few rhythms with a chord sequence I work out. And also to try a few chord inversions, so the notes on the top can begin to form a cohesive melody.

When it comes to the bassline, I will find ways to work chromatic descending bass into my improvisation. This sounds very good, and often forms a focus point for a chord sequence. Sometimes I put the third in the bass. Sometimes the seventh goes into the bass.

Here the bass descends to the seventh and down to the third of the C chord, to finally rest on F, with an added 2nd (G) added on top. This kind of sequence works best when the bass is very low indeed, perhaps one to two octaves below where I've written it here.

After a number of years playing, I have tried out pretty much all the chord sequences there are. But of course that is wrong because there are plenty of chord sequences that sound terrible. And I naturally avoid those after perhaps making the mistake of trying them. Once.

Another thing to remember is that the melody doesn't have to fit the chord. You may find that the melody contains suspended notes, or even notes that are entirely off-chord. This can be to great effect.

Chord inversions are of interest, when you are playing. They can help add color to the chord. And sometimes inversions are totally necessary in creating the feel you want.

Here I have shown some inversions of the C ninth chord, with the root of the chord (C) taken out. It's only fair that someone should play only four notes at a time, to avoid too much of a handful of notes. The one I favor lately is the third in the sequence, with the G being played by the thumb.

Ninth chords are in general interesting because they produce a thicker chord. In C alone, there are at least four interesting ninth chords. I have shown some of them here.

They really only differ in whether the E and the B are natural or flatted.

The C major ninth chord (or CM9) is bright, a bit dissonant, and often leads into a C chord by having the top two notes raise diatonically up to C and E.

The C minor ninth chord (Cm9) is soft and brooding. There is less dissonance because there is no B natural. But now the D and the Eb form a direct dissonance.

The C ninth (C9) chord has no semitone dissonance, and has a lush, cheerful sound. It is descended directly from the C seventh chord, but has an added D.

The C minor major ninth (CmM9) chord combines the darkness of the major chord with the dissonance of a C major ninth chord, and can be a bit ghastly and tragic.

So you can alter the color of your music by using the right chord. This is particularly so in the first chord of your verse. For instance, Pink Floyd, in their song Breathe, starts their verse off with an Em9 chord, resolving to an A chord. It is the minor ninth chord, with its sonorous sound, yet tainted by the added 2nd, creates the ambience of the entire song. In fact, that particular song has some of the most perplexing and powerful chord sequences in the repertoire.

A Question and an Answer

It has always been interesting to me, since improvisation and music generation is so completely hardwired into my brain, if it might not also be possible to write a computer program to do something similar. I think harmony is pretty easy to encode into a computer program. Indeed, in 1975 I did such a thing.

But it is an entirely different thing to encode the structure of music into a computer program. I am, of course referring to the high-level structure of music. The ABA format, the romantic period sonata form with its introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda sections. If we look at modern songs, there is the intro/verse/refrain/bridge/outro structure and all the common rearrangements of them.

My question is this: even if all these forms were to be faithfully duplicated by a songwriting program, would the computer be able to replicate the angst, emotions, and desires of the human composer?

The answer is simple actually. Such a songwriting program would not be able to write the songs. That would be the human user's job. Why do I say this? Because with Painter, our job was to accurately collect the artist's expression, and faithfully reproduce it, allowing the artist's style to come through. Because Painter and the computer running it are enablers for human creativity. They allow you to do more than you could do before.

And this is precisely what a songwriting program would do for a composer: enable them to compose bigger and better pieces, and let their emotions and creativity come through like never before.

And What About Improvisation?

Well, after many years of work at the piano, my brain is that channeler of creativity. That enabler of emotional expression.

Maybe Fractal Design Composer is what's needed. Maybe I can take my improvisational skills and build a program around it.

Maybe that's where music and me come full circle.

Hmm.