Rough Raga Riffs
program notes

Rough Raga Riffs is the sonic output of my attempt to grow a wailin'
heavy-metal guitarist in my NeXT computer.  For this piece, however, the
heavy metal seems to have been mined somewhere in South India -- hence the
'raga' in the title.

The synthesized guitar sounds come from a remarkable variation of the
Karplus-Strong (or "plucked-string") digital synthesis algorithm written by
Charles Sullivan.  The 'virtual guitarist' you hear performing is actually a
LISP program designed to improvise suitably "wailin'" guitar riffs when
given a simple scale.  I'm able to coerce different sorts of melodies and
playing techniques by holding long conversations in LISP with my home-grown
guitar player, but the actual note-by-note musical choices (pitch, rhythm,
articulation, etc.) are being made by something other than me.
And I swear I can hear it practicing late at night...