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... :unsure:

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-->

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.

Eww.

Maybe it will make more sense if you watch this video.

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.

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 *

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