A chord is when a person presses more than one piano keys to enrich a sound,

some key combinations sound better than others.

For no reason in particular, when the keys of a nicely sounding chord,

are played one after another instead of all at once, something neat happens.

The tiny melody you make by breaking up the chord,

sounds pretty good to the ear.

And it does not even matter what sequence you play those keys in,

to give some kind of an explanation, the way I think of it is this:

Nicely sounding chords, are made up of friendly notes,

and they are such good friends, that they can be played all at once or one after another.

They go together,

it is what friends do.

Listen to this example,

I play a chord made up of three notes twice.

(Chord meaning that I press the three notes all at once)

And then, I take all the three notes of the chord,

shuffle them, and play them one after another.

True to their friendship,

they make a little nine note melody, here it is:

* BROKEN CHORDS PLAY *

Someone noticed this,

and decided to create a little machine.

It would generate chords,

break them up, and play them one after another.

That machine is called:

The Arpeggiator.

Of course, you know how machines are,

they do a good job most of the way, but, yeeeeeesh, it never quite works.

It certainly wont make a song for you,

the main melody won't be that great.

Take a listen to this, in this example I show you pure machine work,

I just set the instruments, and turned on the Arpeggiator.

At first I demonstrate what the instruments sound like all by themselves,

and then I kind of try to make a song, it could work, but not quite, not always.

* THE MACHINE MELODY PLAYS *

But there is something, there is a french composer named Jean-Michel Jarre,

that made a song named Oxygen.

I listened to Oxygen 2 a few times when I was little,

and I always felt like it was full of Robots, Ghosts In The Machine, and Arpeggiators.

Today, I attempt to create a song inspired by Oxygen 1, a somewhat simpler version,

and I only use the Arpeggiators.

Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygen 2 has a very strong and very pretty melody,

and an Arpeggiator just can't handle creating that, not reliably.

So here is my robotic and automated take on Oxygen 1,

enjoy.

* MY OXYGENE SONG PLAYS *