Alchemical Musick
I made this project for my MUSC 402 (Music and Sound for Media) class my Junior year of college, way back in my undergraduate days. The assignment was make a "virtual instrument." I had had a dream once, in which a chorus of dancing fairies were singing about "dragon's potion X" where X was some color. The only verse I remember distinctly was:
Dragon's Potion Red,
Makes the bumps fall off your head!
(percussion solo)
It was all pretty surreal. I remember there were all sorts of other colors, but I forgot the verses to them. I also remember that each one RHYMED, even and especially the ones that had "rhyming" words that didn't rhyme in real life. For instance, one of the verses might have been "Dragon's Potion Orange / makes you turn into a chameleon", and in the dream, it would be perfectly sensible that "orange" rhymed with "chameleon." Dreams are weird like that.
Anyway, I used the dream as my inspiration for the project. I headed over to a guy named Calpomatt's website (he was a guy who made really nice freeware technoloops; his site is now defunct) and got some tracks. I sorted them subjectively by the "color" they sounded like (it helps that I'm a bit synaesthetic, maybe it's related to my Dain Brammage). Then I numbered each song in a colored group one through five. In the project, you pick anywhere from one to five drops and then mix your potion. The order you pick the colors in determines which techno songs are part of your final composition. For example:
Red, Green, Black, Blue, Blue will play: Red #1, Green #2, Black #3, Blue #4, Blue #5,
which is a completely different song than
Blue, Blue, Green, Black, Red, which is: Blue #1, Blue #2, Green #3, Black #4, Red #5.
I don't know how many permuatations there are, but you can get some good variety out of it.