Random Album Cover – the Creative Commons Way

i’ve been waiting for someone to tag me on that 25 things meme, mostly because it’s come across a couple of the blogs i read, but i guess i either have no friends or everyone knows everything there is to know about me.  either way poor, poor, pitiful me.  anyway, i’m getting my revenge by having the most bad.ass. random album cover, and it’s inspired me to up the ante on this whole thing…

first: 

CREATE YOUR BAND NAME & ALBUM COVER:

To Do This

1 – Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to Quotations Page and select “random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Grab the photo randomly generated from Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr here:http://mikelietz.org/code/flickr-ccgettr.php

4 – Use Paint.Net or Gimp or similar to put it all together.

———————————-

this all started because i got the most awesome band name, and it only got better from there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoździec,_Lesser_Poland_Voivodeship

my random quote was
When you relinquish the desire to control your future, you can have more happiness.
Nicole Kidmanin The Scotsman 

and my random photo was
http://flickr.com/photos/26422362@N02/3304450435/
by /meaghan préfontaine 

here’s the result:

gwoździec - more happiness

i am so happy about this result that i’ve decided this album needs to be made.  so to go along with the spirit of random and creative commons, i’m trying to devise a system by which one could create an entire album in the same vein as the album cover thing.

– so, the first step is to decide how many tracks are on the album.  i’m not sure of a cc way to do this, my idea is to go to amazon.com (there’s gotta be a random  page thing?) or possibly a better idea is go to discogs.com.  there’s no random album thing there, but i did a search for my album title and i think the answer is to pick the first full-length release you come to (my first 3 search results were singles).  that is, unless you just want to do a single/ep, which, i suppose, could be an acceptable entry.  so my first full length result is this:
http://www.discogs.com/Anything-Box-Dance-CD-5/release/237124
my album will have 11 tracks (i guess an even easier way is to roll a d12…)

now you need songs.  you can cheat and just do a compilation based on full-length creative commons tracks, but…that would be cheating.  a better idea is to scour freesound.org or some other such sound archive and create your own songs based on what you get.  most of these are fragments so they will require software and time and inspiration and some amount of musical talent (but in these days of GarageBand and song mashups, not really all that much musical talent).  freesound does have a random sample search, so i think the method is get as many samples as you need to compose music that is entirely created with cc’d samples.   there’s a couple other places to get sounds that you can find on the creative commons site, freesound is just what i used for the rpm project.

last, anyone who actually completes this, let me know and put me in the liner notes or send me a copy or something.  you can expect gwozdziec’s debut to be coming in the next couple months.

note: i have no idea how to even pronounce gwozdziec, that’s part of what makes it so awesome.

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