My recent projects

I see...I had never heard of hyperinstruments before you brought it up.

Here's a link to a page about a hyperinstrument bow for anyone who's interested: http://www.media.mit.edu/hyperins/projects...rviolinbow.html

So how does it work? Are the special sounds created automatically, or is it the performer's responsibility?

I must confess I don't get it. Is the bow wired to an amplification system? Are there buttons on it? I'm not understanding how all those extra sounds are created or where they're coming from. If you could enlighten me, Dan, I would be much obliged.

I don't know much about hyperinstruments, really. That wasn't the point of the music anyway; I just wanted something that sounded better than MIDI in terms of expressiveness. If you want to know more I guess just poke around on Google.

I really like these pieces. I am not sure how precise you are on your description, though--I read what you are saying and I know what you are talking about, but the music doesn't match what you are talking about.

As far as the pieces themselves, I give an A+.

One question, though--why are they all in the same "key?"

I am too busy at work to say more, but I plan to get back to this topic.

I like the internal diversity of timbre and duration that these have. And the whole idea of wanting to play in three dimensions, between instruments, is something I really resonate with. I hope to soon be writing a piece for up to 120 glass bottles played by 12 people.

I don't like the pitches you chose; did you think long and hard about the set of notes to begin with? I'm not sure what to think about everything being in the same rhythmic grid, though I noticed myself wanting to hear it in groupings of four "sixteenth-notes." Perhaps accents of loudness could offset this effect?

If you have csound files perhaps others could download csound and hear them that way? (I have downloaded but done nothing with it.)

Hi again, Dan. Nice to see you've taken your compositions in some new directions since we saw you last!

I'm intrigued by the concept here. How much more restricted is the music, then, with a hyperinstrument? I have nothing against music with a lot of rules as to its performance (heck, all of my music's pretty darn classical), but I wonder. How do you get around the inevitable question of its obstructiveness, both on paper and in performance? Is the whole concept sort of a very intuitive, natural extension of the instrument, or does it take more considerable getting used to?

Oh, and I couldn't watch the video, so if that explained any of it, excuse any redundancy. * grins *

So, wish I could listen to them. Do you have any midi's?

Argg. I *knew* I shouldn't have mentioned the hyperinstruments. I've been working on some of the problems people have mentioned off and on; the pieces are supposed to modulate keys but for the most part they don't and I don't understand why; I guess I need to do some more work with the code. I could post the csound intermediary files, but the only thing that would let you do would be to produce the exact same sounds from your computer, since there's no graphical editor that loads them nor anything at present that converts them to MIDI.

All I meant by bringing up the hyperinstruments was that my score specified not only the pitch and duration of each note but also included notatation of the timbre. This was both to simulate the effect of multiple instruments and to kill some of the dullness that comes from listening to MIDI simulations with each note articulated exactly like every other note. Beyond that, I'm not up on anything having anything to do with research at the MIT media lab.

I've been busier this summer than I expected, so it'll take a while to get the next generation of music out. Eventually I hope to have a computer-aided composition environment that will take as input a melody / harmonic structure and produce sucessive generations of orchestral scores that can be interactively refined by the composer until a close-enough approximation is produced, at which point the parts can be hand-tweaked. Writing 80 different parts moving at the same time is simply too difficult for a single composer.

On the other hand, perhaps what would be computer input can simply be put onto a page and the performers can come up with their own parts. In either case I'm going to have to work a bit more to figure out some rules that make sense.

Sounds like a nice idea which has potential. Sounds quite a lot like other computer composed music, however - on one end fractal generated music, and at the other, the electronic sounds of Autechre. What you've made is nice, although as you've made clear it's going to be going somewhere, rather than it being a destination you have already reached.

Hello Dan...
Personally, I'm not at all interested in how you came about these pieces.
I simply let my ears soak it all in. They are much too dense for temporal analysis.
As you mentioned, notation may indeed be too difficult to jot down.
I respect these multi leveled sound intervals for what they are.
I came to this forum to find music that will make me go WOW! I guess I have come to the right place.
Thanks for presenting these wonderful pieces of imagery and creativity Dan.
The pleasure was all mine...

Mike