James Murphy Is Using U.S. Open Tennis Data To Make 400 Hours Of Music
As the former frontman of LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy has earned enough goodwill that he can spend the rest of his life farting around with film scores and coffee, and nobody will have any right to get mad about it. Murphy’s latest project is very much in the farting-around category, but it’s pretty interesting in theory. As Self-Titled points out, Murphy and IBM are teaming up to use the raw data from tennis matches in the U.S. Open, which is currently going on, to make an algorithm that’ll turn each match into its own unique musical piece. In the end, they’ll have almost 400 hours of music, though it’s not like that music is being written or played by humans. “I’m not writing music,” says Murphy in an online trailer for the project. “I’m generating probabilities for music.” Check out that trailer below.
You can already head over here to listen to plenty of music from the project, and based on clicking through a couple of matches, it mostly sounds like random bloop-bloop stuff.