[CP 188 CD] Willie Ruff, John Rodgers, Michael McNabb; The Harmony of the World

Fascinating one-off Computer Music curio from 1979, released, incredibly, on Book-of-the Month Records, "a Division of Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc." Much like Laurie Spiegel's Voyager "Golden Record" piece, "Harmonices Mundi," Johannes Kepler's star-math was used as a template for the cyclical periods of a series of Digital Oscillator algorithms, which were then sent spinning in & around each other. The result is not unlike the Pythagoron™ LP, or even Thorkell Sigurbjornsson's somewhat contemporaneous "La Jolla Good Friday", in that the often woozy held-tone grind has a certain psychedelic effect when applied with a fair dose of volume.

The "authors" of this exercise were a pair of Yale professors, Willie Ruff & John Rodgers who, with the significant aid of Composer Michael McNabb - his 1750 Arch LP of Computer Music is an underrated slice - synthesized these realizations on the University Computer Center's IBM 360/91 using a flavor of Max Mathews & Barry Vercoe's Music 360. 

This Creel Pone reproduction includes a replica of the 8-page booklet included with the original edition, outlining Kepler's methods via a series of diagrams & charts.