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Dr. David Petersen

Dr. David Petersen

Composer of jazz-tinged neoclassical pieces. Art, literature, and ramblings. Translator. Degrees in psychology and theatre studies.

No, I Don’t Compose Using Text-to-Music

1 min readSep 27, 2026

In this AI-hyped era, one would be excused for questioning whether any new music with someone’s name on it is original to the composer or whipped up in seconds on SUNO.

Here is my latest 3-minute sketch (‘doodle-of-the-day’), followed by a real-time recording of the 2 hours or so it took me to write it.

Beginners might be interested in how the music comes together using a number of techniques. It also illustrates the utility of good notation software, capable of a decent mock-up.

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For this sketch, I started with a few random chords to spark my imagination, and as a melodic line gradually took shape, I fleshed it out using canon, augmentation, retrograde motion, inversion (C/G axis), and bar-by-bar reharmonization by ear.

About an hour into the sketch, a guiding image finally occurred to me, which also supplied the title: a lone security guard at a data farm, 2 am and bored to bits, listening to the drone from the machines, yawning ever-so-slightly…

Enjoy! Comments always welcome.

Parkinson’s sucks. Help find a cure.

https://youtu.be/w4gD-7DewKc

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Dr. David Petersen
Dr. David Petersen

Written by Dr. David Petersen

Composer of jazz-tinged neoclassical pieces. Art, literature, and ramblings. Translator. Degrees in psychology and theatre studies.