DeMMa is a project that grew from small beginnings when I was looking at how to generate some rules for serial music composition.
I hit on the idea of looking at mathematical formulae and assigning them a note value. This was DeMMa “Rules A” and you can see what that looks like here:
I shared this idea with Professor Robert Kowalewski who is a particle physicist and a leading light at CERN in Geneva Switzerland. He went through my DeMMa frameworks and came up with the concept of ZERO. That is when no sound is playing.
The other features of DeMMa rules are: I can choose which octave to play a note, and I can decide on how long the note is played.
You can see an explanation of DeMMa rules here in this spiffy video.
Using the DeMMa “Rules A” I then scored and did sound design on a short CGI animation video. Stuck to the original DeMMa rules one and did not enter “The Zero”.
You can see the animation here. It is called “Strange Voyager”.
Enter DeMMa “Rules B”
So… I had the great idea that I could rewrite Rules A and fold it into Rules B.
Rules B assigned new note values to actual words, so you could take the phrase “I love you” and it would play a lovely tune.
From this I worked with the brilliant software guru Deon Bonthuys in Johannesburg who did the heavy lifting creating an App for Windows and it will be available on Android.
What DeMMa the App plans to do.
Open the App, The keyboard will appear. Type in “I love you”, choose recipient and press send as a text message or WhatsApp. The recipient opens the message and using the MIDI functionality on their phone, it plays the music and the text “I love you” appears.