Rienzi

I've just released a tool which I hope makes composition more casual and less imposing: http://nullcomposer.com http://www.youtube.c...h?v=OV1ekV-QMT8 Do you think the anonymous/collective angle brings anything to making music? It works great for stuff like wikipedia, link posting (reddit), photoshop contests etc. With NC it's super easy remix anyone else's work and repost, plus the anonymity means no one's afraid of making mistakes. At any rate I figured you here at YC would dig it the most, so enjoy. - Justin.

Hi all. I'm running a new variations contest at teamcomposer.com. 1st prize - $25 2nd prize - $15 3rd prize - $10 http://teamcomposer.com/song.php?id=76 There is no entry fee, and the deadline is 7/1/2010. Please note that you must use TeamComposer to write your entry. If you have questions or run into any bugs, feel free to contact me on YC or through the 'contact us' link. - Justin.

Yes, sort of...you could open other people's songs, but you had to save your own copy. So it was more like sending .mus files back and forth -- TeamComposer is more like Google Docs, but for composition. You can see/chat with others working on the same piece, and see what section of the song they're working on. You can still edit others' works, but now they're called 'variations' on the site, and are attached to the original song.

Some friends and I have just gotten our new composition app on-line: http://www.teamcomposer.com (previously known as MusicDNA Composer) TeamComposer is mainly a sequencer, but it 'knows' basic harmony and helps you to generate chord progressions and harmonies. It's not a replacement for current score editing or sequencing apps like Finale/Logic etc, it's more of a social composition site, and also a teaching tool -- it's fairly beginner oriented and has music lessons and wizards and such. What's unique about it is that it's collaborative and integrated with the web -- multiple composers can work on the same piece in real-time, with each collab session having its own chat room, and you can 'tweet' pieces of music to the front page or publish them to your facebook news feed. I'm hoping the collaboration angle makes it useful to communities like YC, and in the educational arena as well. There's been a big push towards collaboration in education the past few years, and everyone now expects apps to work easily with other apps and the web these days. I'm hoping TC can bring this to the realm of music composition. So enjoy! If you run into any major bugs etc, you can use the contact us form, or I might be in the chat room (eightfold). - Justin.

You can also try MusicDNA, which is free as long as you create an account... MusicDNA Composer: A free web-based music composition application. ...it's fairly beginner oriented -- it has lots of 'training wheels' for helping you build chord progressions and such. Also the sequencing is grid-based rather than staff, so that takes some getting used to. But, once a piece is sequenced, you can save it to your PC as MIDI, then sample it with GarageBand and (I believe) CuBase.

Hey all! I've just finished a web-based game which lets beginners experiment with writing rhythm: Rhythm Composition Game Essentially you click around a grid to set down note durations for guitar + drums, then click a button to play it as MIDI and generate a score. I hope it's really easy to figure out, and useful to at least a few people here on YC. - Justin

As QcCowboy said, for notation software, Finale and Sibelius are the favorites, with many composers trending toward Finale. For sequencing, if you're comfortable writing note-by-note, Apple Logic is the best I have personally used, and the Express version is only 2 hundo, just a bit out of your price range. May I also humbly suggest an application I wrote, MusicDNA Composer. It's free, web-based, and oriented toward the beginner. It actually uses Lilypond as its score generator, so in that sense it's a user-friendly GUI for it, and includes MIDI playback. To see if you like it, check out the demo page: MusicDNACentral.com - Demonstration There are 3 songs you can play around with, including Fur Elise. You'll find it's very good with sequencing, key/harmony changes and writing new diatonic music.

Here you're getting into questions of the abstraction of instrumental music. It's fair to say William Burroughs couldn't have written Naked Lunch if he hadn't been addicted to heroin. But that's the written word, which is very specific. Music is different, it's capable of an incredible variety of interpretations. But still, it has to come from somewhere, and it's filtered through your personality and past experience in the process of writing. If you're a precocious, joyous young Mozart, you're almost certainly not ready to write the Requiem Mass.

Accessible Contemporary Music in Chicago does a new piece weekly, which it then puts up for streaming/downloading on the internet... Weekly Readings ...but there aren't many places doing this, and there are a lot of composers submitting pieces, so you might have to wait. Re: starting your own band, that's probably the best way: you know your performers and what they can do, and most every city has somewhere for them to play. I plan to team up with an experienced singer/songwriter, which should open a lot more doors than instrumental 'art' music alone could.

Michael's "you are what you eat" hypothesis is very enlightening. When writing music, you're focusing your mind on developing musical ideas -- that requires you to use many different faculties at the same time: imagination, emotion, pattern-recognition, technical/computational, etc. For the technical stuff it's just training/practice, but the rest has to come from past experience in those areas...which means all the music you've ever listened to, your past emotional experiences, etc. From original post: 'Could someone in suburban American write something with the same conviction as DS's 4th for example?' I'd say no. Without the same horrific experiences, like being enemies with Josef Stalin for decades, your musical mind just won't be able to 'take you there', and if you try to force it, people who *have* been there will be able to tell.

I use MusicDNA Composer > Logic. Ploki is right on about Logic, its score editor is surprisingly good for arranging/changing music, Finale's a bit too fussy about how everything looks. In the future, I hope to get some piano fluency, and more compositional fluency so I can compose straight to paper. Heheh, I guess I'm moving straight backwards, technology-wise. Chemically speaking, I think a certain green substance beats caffeine hands down ;)

Hey all! MusicDNA Composer has just re-launched with a totally new design, and a much simpler GUI. I just wanted to let you know that it's out there, free, and hopefully a valuable resource for you: MusicDNACentral.com Demonstration Although you all already have your own tools and software, I think this app may be useful -- it's great for taking down musical ideas quickly and precisely, then sharing those ideas with others, wiki-style. You can also download your song to your home PC as a MIDI, then edit it with Finale, Sibelius, Logic, Garritan, etc, so it's great as a musical sketchpad. What do you all think? I'm happy to answer any and all of your questions!! - Rienzi P.S.: If you had an account on the old version of the site, it should still work. Email me if you have trouble.

Here's a quick demo video to get everyone started: http://musicdnacentral.net/downloads/demo001.html The app: MusicDNA Composer I'll have a series of better videos in a week or two.

Hey all. Since people are having trouble with the interface, I'm working on a quick-n-dirty introductory video on to how to use the GUI, it'll be done tomorrow. I've got some better ones on the way though for next week... Daniel, there are many possibilities to be explored with it. Right now it only offers the very basics to work with: diatonically oriented chords, phrases, rests, and the simplest of motives. But the lego-like nature of these musical bits, along with the collaborative nature of a web application, will allow them to be built upon and built upon in an infinite variety. I suppose it will take some time and a lot of effort for me to make my vision of its usefulness plain on the first viewing, just as new music takes a while to establish itself.

Euler, Thanks again for your helpful comments. I've been staring at the interface for so long that I guess I'm surprised when people don't know how to use it instantly, ha. You're right, it's definitely non-trivial. I am in the process of making some how-to videos, I think that'll help a lot. I'm also still looking for testers, only one person has asked about it so far. I'll try and have some videos done next week or so. Well, I still encourage people to sign up. You can still create accounts and upload your midis/mp3s for sharing. And, if you've got time to figure out the interface, you can still make music with the composition app. Re: not getting any playback, you're probably not hitting OK after adding phrases/chords...I should make it green. Not sure about the cursor shape thing, I'll keep my eye out.

The application is a tool for rapidly creating music based on pitch, duration, volume, and instrument. David Cope's EMI is an analysis and synthesis machine, which is more of a synthetic musical brain. MusicDNA Composer is more like having a room full of scribes on pianos which you can shout orders to: "Build me a melody on IV which goes up to the 5th stepwise in eighths, then down to the root in quarters," then they'll create the score and play it for you. Don't like it? Have it done again a little differently. Candlelight Sonata was written in this way, step-by-step, it was not auto-generated in any way. But, since it's a new tool, I wouldn't expect it to replace anyone's favorite tool, such as Finale or Sibelius. If you've spent years mastering those applications, then indeed, as Euler says, it is as natural as breathing and there might not be any reason to switch. However, since MusicDNA is a web-app, it does have some advantages to doing it with software or the old fashioned way, on paper. First, it's collaborative. If someone writes a melody they like, they can save it, wiki-style, and anyone else can use it in their songs. It can be a challenge to find, analyze and extract melodies or other patterns from others' music using Finale/MusicXML, etc. Second, it's super-sharable. When you make your music available publicly, you'll get a URL which you can easily distribute, youtube style. Finally, it's beginner/kid friendly. Since there'll be a large library of user-created melodies, harmonies, motives and other predefined patterns of music, as well as a colorful GUI for arranging these basic elements of music, it is easy to quickly create music of high informational content. Oh yeah, it is possible to do different styles such as the restriction of tones to a given set, but it requires that you know how to write MusicDNA code (based on perl) to do so, which, incidentally, is how you'd get around pretty much any restriction that the GUI presents. I realize this is a bit much to ask of people though :)

Hello YC. I wanted to show everyone a new music composition application I've written. My hope is that it becomes the premier Web 2.0 app for composing tonal music, so it should be helpful to all you tonal composers. MusicDNACentral.net - main page MusicDNA Composer The GUI for the application is as easy to use as I could make it. It's very classical/romantic-oriented: it takes care of harmonic progressions, keys, etc, and lets the composer focus on creating melody and harmony. It'd be a real challenge to write atonal music with it. In addition to the composition app, you can also share your own midis/mp3s. Please feel free to post whatever you like. Here's a short sonata-form movement I recently wrote: Candlelight Sonata Any comments you have would be greatly appreciated. I think that if people keep adding to the musical material that's available, wiki-style, this thing could grow pretty big. P.S. If anyone is interested in helping to test the application (it is still in public beta mode), I'm looking for about 5 people to run through a test plan I have written up in MS Word. It'll take about an hour, and I'll PayPal $15 for the completed test plan. If you're interested, please email me at rienzi (at) musicdnacentral.net.

Sure thing! I'm so happy people are interested. A word of warning, it won't be anything special, we'll just be sight reading it for an hour or two. What he's doing is way cool, he does a new piece every week: Accessible Contemporary Music Weekly Readings

Euler, You're right, the performance certainly can't compare with a real one. What MusicDNA produces is a simple MIDI: no tempo changes, fermatas are tough, all the notes are in the duration multiples of 32nd notes. Luckily that's how I think musically: structure, harmony, melody. The musicians should take care of the actual musicality of the piece. I could have done more with Logic's *excellent* sequencing, but I'm still a neophyte with it. I'm happy I could map the midi to Miroslav and get a reverb going. That only took an hour or so...making it sound like a real performance would've taken forever. MusicDNA does also produce (rough) sheet music, which could be played by musicians (if anyone would like a pdf copy of Candlelight plz msg me). My comp teacher has a cellist lined up to play it and record it, I can't wait to hear the real thing!

Hi YC folks. I've been taking private composition lessons since last I posted, and this sonata-form piece shows my newfound skill at manipulating and sequencing melodies while cycling through various harmonies. It breaks the rules a little here and there, either where it sounded good or inexperience led me astray. Candlelight Sonata - for cello and piano I hope it's as much fun to listen to as it was to write. Enjoy!

Hey everyone. I just finished a first draft of a compositional sketchpad for non-musicians: MusicDNA Sketchpad Have fun!!! And feel free to pass it around!

Thanks lj. Elton John, eh? Ha. I grew up listening to a steady diet of Beethoven, seems like what I write resembles him the most.

http://musicdnacentral.net/song.003.CsN.mp3 This was written using MusicDNA Composer. It uses lots of chords and arpeggiated chords to maintain a consistent, controlled harmony, regardless of key area. It took about 3 days to complete, though I've been studying harmony for about a month without writing anything. The opening theme is meant to represent frustration. Enjoy!!!

I'd say that sheet music is among the best possible systems for conveying musical ideas to performers. If it's got a shortcoming, it's in the performers themselves: they don't read it. If you're talking about sheet music's fitness for communicating 'what to play' to the musician, it works very well for those who've had the training necessary to read what you write. Whatever can't be written (odd timings, slight disconnects between instruments, "be more dreamy") can be communicated by the composer either verbally or in a recording. But most musicians these days, certainly the ones with the ear of the public, are more likely not to read sheet music whatsoever than to be able to. So, you've got to know how to write guitar tabs, how to just say what you want, and how to work it out parts with the musician -- this is especially true when working with drummers and singers. Most rock musicians can't read sheet music in the least -- they expect chord progressions and a basic idea of the rhythmic 'gist' of the piece, broken up into the usual fragments of a rock song: intro, chorus, verse, bridge, etc. Hip hop or manufactured pop? Best to know software: Logic, Ableton, Reason, because you won't really have performers.

Agreed. Though, Classical does seem to be fundamental to our natures: we whistle and sing tonally from an early age, and Mozart's orchestral music sounds crystalline and pleasant to just about everyone at any age. The trouble is that everyone grows up listening to rock, hip-hop, metal, etc, and don't get the listening skills they need to 'get' classical music. I feel that in order for classical's unique possibilities and virtues to get 'on top' again, we as composers will have to deal with the fact that our audience got their early musical imprints from Metallica rather than Mozart -- and compose such that we are comprehensible to this new audience.