Frequently Asked Questions
But why?
I thought it’d be a fun way to create and release music, tackle an interesting web development challenge, and pay homage to the weird and wonderful world of New Age music from the 1970s to 1990s, when independent visionaries and petite bourgeois opportunists both released scores of truly brilliant and sometimes baffling musical releases that promised inner harmony, spiritual transcendence, altered mental states, physical relaxation, and artistic inspiration. It’s both a nostalgic exploration of the visual, discursive, and sonic formulas embodied by New Age music releases, as well as a playful experiment to answer the very New Agey question: what if I left the final creative decision making up to the Universe?
Is this AI?
No, just a website! New Age Tape Generator just uses JavaScript to randomly combine hundreds of variables according to weighted rules and probabilities.
In this way, it applies CSS styles and typographic variables to randomly selected artwork to create the album covers. Artwork and photos are drawn from images I curated from a number of 1990s stock image CD-ROMs preserved at the Internet Archive. The various possibilities for words and layouts were written and designed by me. See credits page for links to the specific image libraries, and while you’re there, spend some time exploring the Internet Archive because it might be the greatest place on the internet.
Similarly, the music is randomly combined from over a hundred original melodic, rhythmic, and textural loops I created in Ableton Live that are arranged according to weighted rules coded in JavaScript and processed in real-time via the Web Audio API graph, which is a powerful JavaScript based system for synthesizing and processing audio in web browsers.
Because of the number of elements and variables, the number of potential unique combinations is basically limitless–likely in the trillions or quadrillions. So each time you hit the generate button you’re creating a snowflake.
So no AI?
For full AI transparency: I used GitHub Copilot (a coding assistant that comes packaged with my coding software) to assist me on the coding side.
Where can I learn about or listen to the kind of New Age cassette releases that inspired this site?
This incredible New Age cassette YouTube channel: Sounds of the Dawn
This article over at Perfect Circuit
This 1989 article by Steven Halpern from the New Age Music Guide by PJ Birosik (pdf): Notes on New Age Music by Steven Halpern
Check out these vinyl reissues by the Numero Group
