As a final foray into both chaos and free jazz, I have produced an original composition based on the Lorenz attractor in the style of early 1960's free jazz. It incorporates many of Ornette Coleman's compositional and improvisational techniques, as well as melody, form and harmonic basis derived from the specific variables in the Lorenz attractor.
The title, It Ain't My Responsibility, is designed to reflect what is perhaps the greatest artistic lesson I learned during the course of this project. For several weeks during the compositional phase, I was in creative deadlock. Faced with the challenge of producing a compositional product in the free jazz style from a system of nonlinear differential equations, I found myself unable to develop anything tangible. I explored every computer and human imposed system of filtering the raw data I could imagine - each one merely paved the way to a new facet of the now familiar brick wall that stood before me and any sense of a worthy composition..
The answer would lie not in the classic debate between determinism and free will, but the moldy debate of product versus process. Professor Richard Falco discovered that I seem to have been feeling some sort of strange responsibility toward what I would finally lay down on paper as a computer-composed composition. I was so focused on generating an acceptable product that I was ineffectual in creating that very product.
``It was when I realized I could make mistakes that I decided I was really onto something.''
-- Reported by Martin Williams, Jazz, December 1963[5]
In the end, I was able to finally breach the wall for a product that wasn't a product until the very tail end of the process. I present the process here - the product exists solely as the first track on the accompanying cassette, and in some capacity as notated lead sheets in Appendix D, which should be referred to during the explanation of the compositional decisions.