toy satellite

generative interpretations of "good morning to all"

It is alleged that the much contested 1935 copyright registration of the song "Happy Birthday", originated with the melody, "Good Morning to All" published in 1893 and is public domain by US Statute.

The only difference between the two pieces is the first note which is split to accommodate the two syllables in the word hap-py. Other than this, the two pieces are melodically identical, suggesting that the only element of the melody that does not fall into the public domain is the second note in Happy Birthday.

To celebrate Art's Birthday and a dedication to public domain cultural works Toy Satellite performed generative interpretations of "Good Morning To All" with a resampling of the original and associated texts.

This included a narrative derived from countless birthday greetings and well wishes sourced from the Web and assembled into reasonably coherent phrases with text cut-up engine, Caesarian.

In addition, a custom PERL script fed frequently updated Melbourne weather data to the Scrambled_Bites server in Canada. The key values provided were:

toy Melb_Temp (deg Celcius)
toy Melb_Humidity (%)
toy Melb_Wind_Dir (text - N, S, WNW, etc)
toy Melb_Wind_Speed (knots)

Scrambled_Bites saw Art's Birthday participants sharing and retrieving data, utilising these values to trigger a host of remote events.

Saturday, 17 January 2004, (GMT + 11 hrs) 8PM
>> Generative (MP3) Audio stream (closed)
>> Audio archive (10 minutes)
     (includes a sampling of the Helsinki and Tokyo streams)
Andrew Garton (artistic director, sound)
Roderick Garton (text)
Grant McHerron (technical director)
Koan Pro - Generative Authoring + Synthesis
Koan Audio Plugin
Caesarian Text Cut-up Engine
Caesarian screenshots
Art's Birthday
Scrambled_Bites
Commissioned by and produced in collaboration with
Western Front
, Canada.
Thanks to SSEYO for Koan software support.

Views from the lane at the rear of Toy Satellite on Art's Birthday, Fitzroy, Melbourne.

Andrew tweaking Koan during the live stream.

Art's Birthday grapes at Toy Satellite.

Art's Birthday celebrations were all a bit much for Grant's son, Nykolia.

Grant and Kit.