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Throughout my undergraduate degree, I discovered Markov chains and used them in many generative music patches. I would send histogram messages to the [prob] object in Max, which would allow the generation of numbers based on a Markov chin of weighted randomness. I feel like this always worked effectively, but not efficiently; it took a very long time to write a chain into the format that can be seen below, and the chains upon chains of numbers felt very disconnected from the associated musical output. Creating tools and interfaces to help improve the creative
workflow of my algorithmic performances will be essential to this research project, and therefore I feel will be essential that I find a way of representing the Markov Chains in the form of an accessible and simple UI. Today, I discovered the 'Dial Mode' option of the [matrixctrl] object, and that when enabled turns into a table of turnable dials. These dials could be used as pie-charts that represent the probability that one state will follow another, and thus could be the answer to my Markov interface. As seen below, an 8 by 8 grid could be used to represent the behaviour of a chain of the 8 melodic states of a scale. Interesting!
