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"Prince of the Fairies," and more


Polaris

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@Jean Szulc I'm posting in order to share, as well as to get feedback.

For all of the compositions I've so far posted in this thread, I've been using a certain method--one that closely mimics the human auditory system--to determine the overall pitch of each harmony. What I end up doing when writing out a harmony is setting down a selection of notes close to being within the desired pitch's harmonic series and then adjusting the loudness of these notes to get the exact pitch I want. I'm not so sure this is the best method for writing harmonies, though. For one thing, it's very difficult to avoid having the voices frequently drop out, due to the strictures it places on voice-leading and note choice. For another thing, no one or almost no one has ever used this method before, and yet there is a great deal of wonderful music that has been composed by numerous artists. If the underlying pitch of every harmony is really at the forefront of what we hear, then I would expect almost all music to sound extremely jumpy in terms of melodic motion. In two-voice counterpoint, for example, it is advised that the major sixth should expand outward to an octave at a final cadence and, sure enough, this motion often produces an acceptable effect. But if you look at the underlying pitches, you'll find that there is a huge leap that occurs. So I'm really not sure what to do in order to achieve harmonic clarity. Nothing I've tried--and I have tried a lot of things--has given me exactly the kind of musical texture that I'm going for.

Here's something I composed last night, using a much more traditional approach:

It sounds richer than anything I posted before it in this thread, but also less clear.

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  • 1 month later...
4 hours ago, Esper said:

It sounds similar to the soundtracks in the Castlevania games. Which VSTs did you use for the guitars? 

 

Thank you for listening! I didn't actually use a VST; I used the guitars in a soundfont called Real Font.

Anyway, here's another one that I just composed:

 

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The message boxes on this website are severely buggy, with the result that getting them to load often takes several minutes for me, making it very frustrating to post. Anyway, I revised the above composition a little, mainly making one of the instruments much clearer in the mix:

.

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Hey man, I like your work so far. My advice to you is to create a separate thread for each track you post, it can be a little overwhelming to keep track of this music log when looking for new pieces by you. 

That said, I like the 8-bit vibes. Great work, I look forward to hearing your improvements!

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  • 2 months later...

Thanks for the kind comment. I would create a new thread for each piece, but I feel that most of them don't warrant one. And there would potentially be too many threads.

Anyway, here are a few super short pieces that I wrote today:

https://soundcloud.com/user-321964225/the-ocean-version-ii

https://soundcloud.com/user-321964225/fog-iv

https://soundcloud.com/user-321964225/glue-ii

 

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  • 3 months later...

I crafted a special soundfont, one whose note chroma change while the height of the pitches does not (the result is a phenomenon called pitch circularity, described by Diana Deutsch and named after the fact that the resulting scale wraps around to the starting pitch if one moves up or down a full octave. The voice leading in such a scale tends to be particularly easy, and brings a focus to good chroma successions as opposed to desirable combinations of note ranges and use of contrary, oblique, similar, and parallel motion.), and used it to write the following super short canon:

 

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