Have you ever sat down and listened to computer music? Not music created on a computer, but music created by a computer? Probably not, huh? There's good reason for this - computers can easily handle the mathematical rules of music, but arranging said rules into a coherent and enjoyable song is another ballgame entirely. This is why software like Brian Eno's Koan Pro veers away from the rigid structure found in today's popular music in favor of a more Zen-inspired sonic environment. Sure, hits by the Spice Girls and Hanson may seem like they were written by machines, but chances are there was at least some human (or possibly alien) intelligence behind the curtain, calling the shots.

That said, I've gone and created my own bit of pseudo-generative music "software" for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0. Of course, it's pretty simple compared to some of the stand-alone packages, and yes, its output lacks a certain aesthetic je ne sais quoi, but occasionally there are flashes of brilliance for which I would gladly claim authorship. And, seeing as it will continue to play until you or your machine cries mercy, it can at least be called prolific if nothing else.

The Active Movie Control, in tandem with your favorite client-side scripting language, allows you to have great control over the properties of your sound and video. You can use it to do the basics, like telling the media to play, pause, or stop, as well as controlling more esoteric functions like changing the volume, panning (on stereo files), varying the speed at which the media play back, and changing the start and end points. You can even determine which elements of the control are visible to the browser, and whether or not their properties can be altered by the user.

What's more, the Active Movie Control will play back almost every file format under the sun. Supported types include AVI, MOV, WAV, MIDI, MPEG-layer1, layer2, and (in what could well be the most subversive gesture Microsoft has ever made) the file format of choice for Internet audio pirates around the world, MPEG3.

The good news is that if you've been paying attention and you know a scripting language reasonably well, your work is almost done. It just so happens that the parameter names that I've outlined are also the properties you use to dynamically alter the Active Movie Control elements with javascript or vbscript. Pretty sneaky, eh? For instance, suppose you had an HTML element that, when clicked on, called the javascript function changeStuff(), which in turn caused a sound in your AMC (which we gave the ID mySound) to change its rate, decrease its volume, and adjust its start and end times. I'm assuming that I don't need to explain event handlers in depth, but, in short (for those of you who may be new to the joys of scripting), you would insert a chunk of text that looks like this into the HTML element that triggers the changes:

onclick="changeStuff()"

<script language="javascript">
	function changeStuff() {
		mySound.Rate = 1.6;
		mySound.Volume = -3000;
		mySound.SelectionStart = 1.0;
		mySound.SelectionEnd = 2.0;
	}
</script>

So, when you click on the appropriate bit of HTML, your sound should speed up rather dramatically, become fairly quiet, and play from a point two seconds into the sound for a period of one second. Provided, that is, that your sound is already playing. What if we had set AutoStart to 0, and all the UI elements to hidden, and turned off the ability for the end-user to access them? Well then you're screwed, right? Wrong! We've got a few built-in methods to do just the trick. The great thing is that they're very easy to understand as well, since they sound just like they should: run(), stop(), and pause(). We've also got a unique property that checks to see whether the sound is running, paused, or stopped - CurrentState. The CurrentState property has three different numerical values that signify these three states: 0 means that the player is stopped, 1 means it is paused, and 2 means the player is running. Therefore, we modify our code slightly, to look like this:

<script language="javascript">
	function changeStuff() {
		if (mySound.CurrentState == 0) {
			mySound.Rate = 1.6;
			mySound.Volume = -2000;
			mySound.SelectionStart = 0.0;
			mySound.SelectionEnd = 1.0;
			mySound.Run();
			}
		else if (mySound.CurrentState == 1) {
			mySound.Rate = .6;
			mySound.Volume = 0;
			mySound.SelectionStart = 1.0;
			mySound.SelectionEnd = 2.0;
			mySound.Run();

			}
		else if (mySound.CurrentState == 2) {
			mySound.Stop();
			}
	}
</script>