LCD Soundsystem Generates Electronic Compositions From U.S. Open Tennis Data

IBM, tennis, and LCD Soundsystem‘s James Murphy are three entities you don’t expect to have anything in common. The U.S. Open Sessions project, the brainchild of Murphy and IBM developer Patrick Gunderson, took raw data from this year’s 2014 U.S. Open Tennis Championships to generate electronic compositions from an algorithm for each match.

“We’re gonna generate over 400 hours worth of music,” says Murphy. “I’m not gonna sit here and play 400 hours of music – I’m setting up a machine to do that. The primary music generator is the algorithm, it’s not me.”

Raise your hand if you’re having flashbacks to high school math classes. Luckily, Patrick Gunderson explains exactly how the algorithm works without over complicating it. There are three parts to the process. The first part is the data from the tennis matches; number of sets, aces, deuces, scores, and all things tennis related. The second is the algorithm the translates the tennis data and releases the third part – the musical output. Musical compositions are already being generated, and you can listen to them here.

LCD Soundsystem retired their project in 2011 so if you’ve been wondering what founding member James Murphy has been up to since then, check out the trailer for the U.S. Open Sessions project above. It explains it way better than we can.