His music label: One tiny dose weekly

Another in the set of 60-second pieces, "Incantation," sounds like a pair of flutes and a bass drum but actually is a computer synthesizer.

These three miniatures represent three weeks of creativity for Darren Nelsen, a 34-year-old computer programmer who is one of the most active and enterprising composers in the Atlanta region. He's also a can-do advocate for local classical musicians, organizing contemporary music concerts and helping launch an online Atlanta composers forum.

His latest project is called "12x60." Each Tuesday evening, he uploads a new installment —- a freshly composed minute-long piece of electronic music. One a week for 12 weeks. It's all free to listen on his Web site, curiomusic.com.

The series plays to a niche audience, albeit one he's intent on capturing. His ranking on ReverbNation.com's charts has "skyrocketed," he said, as he has burst into the top 100 out of more than 11,000 artists in his category.

Perhaps it's because "12x60" taps into the dominant mind-set of our time, of seizure-inducing video edits and hyper information access and scatter-shot news overload.

Or as New York composer Robert Voisey puts it, "Channel surfing has become an aesthetic unto itself." (Voisey's "60x60," from 2003, is one inspiration for Nelsen's set.)

"These are snapshots of a mood for me," Nelsen said. "It's not a narrative, not rhetorical, but a little window into sound and form. Funny thing is, a one-minute work will take on a life of its own once I get started, even if I don't plan it that way. It's a mystery how that happens."

Like plenty of modern a go-go electronic music, Nelsen's art blurs the distinction between hip-classical and artsy-pop —- while embracing today's conventional wisdom about music consumption: People expect music to be free, to dovetail effortlessly into "shuffle" rotation on an iPod and to not tax short attention spans. He e-mails a back-story "blast" to alert his fans when a new piece is on the site.

Georgia Tech professor Jason Freeman, whose own compositions often address the precarious balance of music, audience involvement and technology, hears Nelsen's "12x60" as belonging to the tradition of etudes —- those small "studies" elevated to fine art by geniuses from Chopin to Ligeti, where an idea is pushed and pulled to create a compact world.

"When all possibilities are on the table for a composer, it can be crippling," Freeman said. "Imposing constraints might seem arbitrary or ridiculous, but [can] give you a way to face a blank page."

Nelsen agrees: "With '12x60,' " he said, "I try something completely different with each piece. When I'm done I'll keep these in my back pocket, maybe use ideas as the seeds for other works. I love the discipline of every week having to compose and publish [online].

"Forcing myself to be creative gives me a lot of freedom."

Some observers note that the 60-second craze —- a parallel to the "12"x12"" phenomenon in painting, where artists were given a square-foot canvas and the results were displayed together, like a giant quilt —- is not about our attention-deficit dysfunction society.

'Music at the extremes'

"Culturally speaking, we seem to be doing a lot of music at the extremes," said composer Frank J. Oteri, editor of the Web magazine newmusicbox.org. "We seem especially attracted today to music measured in the blinks of the eye and music that's outside our normal attention span," sometimes outside the human life span.

At one end, he cites many projects similar to Nelsen's: composers who hope to advance their artistry with a rigid schedule —- which might be likened to the now famous couples who schedule sex every night to give focus to, or revive, their marriage.

And at the other end? The glacial operas by Philip Glass are coming into wider vogue. The Atlanta Opera will perform its first-ever modernist opera this season with Glass' "Akhnaten."

Then there's John Cage's "As Slow As Possible," a conceptual piece for pipe organ that seems to shift tectonically, on geological time. It's currently under way at a German church and will last another 638 years.

Composer Freeman sees the two ends meeting: "It's how people listen to their iPods; you keep your finger on the 'forward' button and make snap judgments, often, 'I don't feel like listening to this,' and you move on."

As listeners, we're increasingly used to hearing music in the background so that we're skilled at tuning it in and out. We think, and thus listen, in sound bites.

And 60-second music, or nearly static Glass operas, he said, allow us to swallow as many bites as we like and not feel guilty if we spit the others.

"Some of these ["12x60"] pieces come out better than expected," Nelsen conceded, "some perhaps less so. But what I find more interesting than the end result is the process. It's just a blast to do these things."