When Ghosts Play Piano
June 26, 2008
I was recording the Wednesday Minute song late, late last night. Moving little bits of notes around, I clicked on one of the tracks and a chill went up my spine."....Elaine?" I typed to her on AIM. I can always rely on her to be my partner-in-insomniatic-crime. "My computer has just started playing music. That I didn't write."
She teased me. "It's learning."
Then I sent her over the track my computer was playing, of its own accord. "Olga?" She said. " Get out of the room. It wants to eat you."
You probably think we were overreacting, right? Turn off the lights. Put on your headphones. And play this: Ghost Track 1.
Now there's no hidden mystery checkbox in Garageband that says when you click on an instrument that it will play creepy death march music. I know. I checked. But then I clicked on another track, while writing my song, and the computer ghost started writing counter-melodies: Ghost Track 2.
And it kept getting weirder: Ghost Track 3.
There's got to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, right? Right?
Ghost Track 4.
After about thirty minutes of this, I found the perfectly reasonable, logical, sensible reason as to why my computer was playing ghost-written music.
My piano had started playing itself.
Across the room, my little piano keyboard had set itself off into "demo mode"-- you know, every keyboard has one. The button that suddenly starts playing a cheesy generic drumbeat that you can play along to. And my piano had turned itself on, and was playing silently in the corner, until I clicked on a track: suddenly my piano was playing through my laptop, angry haunted music through whatever instrument I had selected. So the valuable lesson I learned last night, boys and girls, is that a drum beat interpreted by an Indonesian gamelan sounds like the end of the world.
Give a listen to my very not-haunted-I-promise Minute Song from last night: Tent City.
Posted by Olga at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
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