My recent projects

Hmm.. apparently I can't get an mp3 down small enough to fit on here, so I put some links up instead.


82bNLB.mp3

1DW2Hu.mp3

gbAm6n.mp3

sUUKyr.mp3


What do you guys think? Any suggestions?

I've never heard anything like these pieces before. What instrument(s) did you use? Just harpsichord, or is there a guitar as well? (I think I heard one)

First impressions: The unpredictable rhythms and notes makes it seem like you're hearing someone's thoughts. I like the abrupt endings too. But I can't quite put my finger on these pieces, I'm really lost for words here...

Can you post them in notated form, or in MIDI format? I'd be interested to see the scores.

This sounds an aweful lot like this thing in fruityloops, where you can set a key sig. and hit random for any amount of time. Whether or not this music is that, isn't up to me. I can't really comment on this music because it'd completely out of my taste and I would just grade it badly lol. (I'm not intune with the whole random sound-IDM-stuff)

Hey dan,

I'm also at a loss. Are these pieces meant to be played by a musician, or are they supposed to remain only audio files?

How did you go about composing them? It's certainly unique. It's minimalistic in that the key center doesn't really change throughout the course of the movements, and from what I can hear there is no discernible time signature. In this way it's really difficult to grasp on to, because there's no melody - you sort of just have to ride the wave of whatever's coming.

Do these pieces have a form desgined into them?

I was listening to Copland's "Variations on a Shaker Melody" and thinking about all the various ways of presenting the same material, and then I sort of imagined another way of presenting a chord, one in which everyone in the orchestra would have a different part and there would always be something moving. I can kind of hear what I want it to sound like, but it's very difficult to just write it down since I'm thinking of going from one sound in my head to ninety moving lines on paper.

I sort of think about it like this: start with a chord and then replace it with the Alberti bass form; the change means that there is more movement. Now sort of do the same thing to the alberti bass to get even more movement, and then continue several more iterations until you can't pick out the individual notes but only a sense of movement, both melodically and in terms of left-right, front-back throughout the orchestra. (There's an excellent sense of the latter in Tchaikovsky's Trepak).

Anyway, these recordings are sort of intermediate drafts of what I'm trying to go for, but I'm beginning to believe that I could be headed in the wrong direction; I'm not sure that this sort of thing can be notated traditionally. If anyone is familiar with the jazz composer Charles Mingus and how his pieces are always played with the instruments slightly out of sync with each other, that's part of what I'm going for. He didn't notate that, though, he just taught his band how to play that way, and I think that may be the answer here, if there even is an answer.

As to the instrumentation, the pieces are written for what people have (rather unsucesfully) tried to term a hyperinstrument, one for which the pitch, frequency, and exact articulation for each note are notated. Not having such an instrument available. Such instruments do exist; here's a recording of Paganini's 24th caprice played on one. Not having one available myself I simulated one using the Karplus-Strong algorithm in csound. I don't have scores in a format that your computer could read since I wrote most of my own software for this (which only runs on Linux), but if there's really interest in reading them I can probably write some stuff to convert them to PDF files once I can figure out a better way to write out the articulations.

And Big Dan finally shows up. Good morning.

Dan, it sounds like you're a lot further along in the technological realm than I am and probably ever will be. I really enjoyed reading the way the conceptions for these pieces came up. Your description of the constantly moving yet never moving orchestra reminded me a lot of "color" pieces, the most famous of which is Ligeti's "Atmospheres". My old composition teacher used to draw a parallel using maggots and an apple. If you have a rotting apple and it's totally consumed by maggots and you look at it from a distance, you're not going to see any motion. But as you get closer to that apple, you actually see that there is a lot of movement and energy going on within each individual maggot.

Now I'm not trying to say that orchestra players are maggots or tone-color pieces are rotten apples, but the sort of thing you were describing reminded me of all of this.

Could you explain again what you meant by "hyperinstrument"? I didn't exactly get the definition.

Originally posted by aerlinndan+Jun 7 2005, 08:15 AM-->

Eww.

<!--QuoteBegin-aerlinndan@Jun 7 2005, 08:15 AM
[b]Could you explain again what you meant by "hyperinstrument"? I didn't exactly get the definition.

Maybe it will make more sense if you watch this video. The soloist is the only one playing during the Paganini.

Maybe it will make more sense if you watch this video.* The soloist is the only one playing during the Paganini.

Fascinating...it looks just like a standard violin. I'll be reading up on these in the near future, I think.

Fascinating...it looks just like a standard violin. I'll be reading up on these in the near future, I think.

It is a standard violin, at least to the extent that a Stradivarius is standard. It's the bow that's special.