A (brief?) return to music composition

One of my main goals is just to be the shoulders on which giants stand. Everything I discover about music, however small, will go on to inspire generation after generation to come, sending waves and waves of inspiration throughout the rest of history.

I learned something else. The numbers representing the chord transformations cannot go into the negatives, because doing so has a harsh effect. Here's the improved version of that song generated from my simple input melody:

A three-voice canon I composed in a more traditional fashion:

Edited June 25, 2025Jun 25 by Polaris

Edited June 29, 2025Jun 29 by Polaris

Well, what's an invention fugue?😅 I only know Inventions OR Fugues but never know they can be combined...

On 6/28/2025 at 9:41 PM, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

Well, what's an invention fugue?😅 I only know Inventions OR Fugues but never know they can be combined...

 

An invention fugue is a musical invention of mine created while I was undergoing a fugue; hence the name. (It might have better been called a fugue invention, but oh well.)

At any rate, I've gone back to computer programming to study and create music. My latest creation is, in its core idea, a most unique and interesting one if I do say so myself. The main idea behind it is that melody and harmony are identical to each other except they span different axes. No, I don't mean that a melody is an arpeggiated harmony. If it were, melodies generally wouldn't produce such dissonant and incoherent harmonic progressions when the notes comprising melodies are superimposed. No, the way to turn a harmony into melody or a melody into a harmony is much more complicated and esoteric than that. There is a certain principle whereby one can translate one into the other--and even superimpose the two translations over each other to create a coherent harmonic progression rather than a mere static harmony or a monophonic pitch progression. I have--and I think I am the only one who has done it--discovered the principle that makes doing this possible. Using this principle, I have designed a computer program in which I input harmonies, turning them into melodies and melodies, turning them into harmonies, and in which these two translations are played simultaneously to create counterpoint. The amount of effort involved in using it is very little. All I have to do is provide a small amount of detail, and the program fills out the rest.

The piece below is the first remotely serious one I used the program to write. It's very short, and, yes, the instrument that renders it is a harsh-sounding one due to it being the best default instrument. But I think it has some merit to it at least as an illustration of my idea. It should be noted that the piece involves self-imitation, which the principles behind my program, and the program itself, makes pretty easy to implement. There is a motif used once by one voice, slowly, and, at the same time, five times at different pitch heights by another voice. It also has exactly four voices, two of which required a small amount of design on my part (much less than would ordinarily be the case when writing for a pair of voices), the other two of which were generated completely automatically.

Edited August 1, 2025Aug 1 by Polaris

I discovered that the base pitch needs to be ideally calibrated for maximally good effect. Here's the the same piece with ideal pitch collaboration. It sounds way better, way smoother and far less dissonant:

Edited August 2, 2025Aug 2 by Polaris

I've made further progress, having discovered a crucial principle behind music composition. The following piece, though very short, is composed with six voices and includes a great deal of so-called xenharmonicity. Better pieces will no doubt follow.

Edited August 2, 2025Aug 2 by Polaris

Three samples:

The forum refuses to display this one, so here's a link:

https://soundcloud.com/user-321964225/experiment-a

Another experiment, this one very short. It has six voices moving against each other, and is far more consonant than music written in standard 12-tone equal temperament:

Edited August 3, 2025Aug 3 by Polaris

Woops, I made a minor mistake, so here's the fixed version.

With my program, pulling one string pulls the rest. This makes it easy to get a lot done by doing very little. Right now I'm building up a catalogue of permissible chords for use in my music. Every base (not bass) note has a number of chords associated with it, most of which I have yet to discover.

A vast improvement over my technique up until this point. A sample:

Edited August 3, 2025Aug 3 by Polaris

Making very good progress on the music creation program. Here's counterpoint it generated using a simple melody I input:

This one turned out very nicely. Give it a listen:

By the way, I have long since done away with the harsh instruments of my composition program's yore. So if people are not listening because they're afraid of having their ears abused by sawtooth waves, you may rest assured that they problem has to a fair extent been corrected. The instruments are still not ideal, but they're much better than they were.

How does my program work? Well, it certainly isn't one of those random generators. There is no artistic value whatsoever in randomness. No, my program is 100% deterministic. Anyone who knows what they're doing in is in position of control rather than one of letting the winds blow where they may. Basically, the program is A, a musical instrument and B, a tool for calculating good harmony and counterpoint according to certain esoteric principles that I discovered and about which no else knows anything. I use this program because I need a good instrument like any composer and because the calculations involved in properly controlling harmony and counterpoint are thousands of times too complex to perform without the aid of a tool that automates the process and does so quickly. So what do I do? I first design and input a melody. Then I enter a number, one very easy to choose, for each timestamp that turns the melody note into a full harmony that represents it and which will flow smoothly and coherently into the next harmony. Does my program work? I think it is quite clear that it does. Not perfectly--I am still improving the program--but it's certainly getting there.

This one has a great many voices  in it, and benefits from another little discovery I made about harmony:

Fixed a major error in the program's functioning. Here's a piece to illustrate. It has several voices moving at once:

Edited August 5, 2025Aug 5 by Polaris

I started a new and better program from scratch, as the one above, while necessary to create as part of a learning process, is not quite what I currently need. Here's a short and simple piece with three voices moving in counterpoint. It's short because it was a preliminary experiment to test the principles I was contemplating. I think it turned out nicely as a small proof of concept. By the way, it is not in standard 12-tone equal temperament but rather something closer to just intonation:

I accidentally forgot to turn one of the voices on. Here's a better version. Note that the pitches are a bit out of range in the sense that the voices get too close together at points. It's a consequence of the fact that I'm still adjusting the parameters of the program a little:

Reworked the above composition to harmonize with better technique. Also, added two voices so that there are now five moving in counterpoint rather than just 3.

Whoops, I forgot to connect two of the voices to sound output. Here's the fixed version:

This one turned out quite nice. All I did was provide a melody and specify five voices and the harmonization was determined in a purely deterministic fashion: