Fed up with writing melody? Pass it to the audiences!

When you try to compose in a random style, writing melody with random notes or spelling chords with random notes, after you compose for a few measures you may start to find a pattern is forming itself. You can try it but It is extremely difficult.

How about we pass it to the computer, in theory, a computer can generate truly random numbers but we need to set a boundary to it. For instance, we don't want the frequency or the midi note number is beyond the human audible range. In this case, to ensure the numbers are useable, we will design a pseudorandom system that satisfies one or more statistical tests for randomness but is produced by a definite mathematical procedure.

This is a pure data patch that I made. The program would randomly select the notes for the gamelan scale. The fun effect is the melody is randomly generated by the program there shouldn't be any pattern. But the longer you listen to it, your brain starts to organize patterns. Very cool for a composer, just sit back and let the listeners do the melody writing job.

My randomly picking note patch
This example shows, we, human being, is an animal that craves narrative. Methodology to explain natural events is also an example.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post-spectralism influence on tuning

According to Helmholtz (2011), a musical note is due to the fundamental frequency and the quality of a musical sound is due to the presence of upper partials. For traditional western music, pitch perception is mainly fundamental, rather than the frequencies in the spectrum which Teodorescu-Ciocanea (2003) describes as a “note proper” tradition. The spectralism composers shifted the domain from absolute pitches, intervals and chords to the spectrum. Spectral music is a complex approach to timbre, Teodorescu-Ciocanea (2003) classified 9 tendencies and their possibilities in spectral music. To conclude the techniques, tuning the frequencies according to the harmonic series is the major approach; while working with noise, generated digitally and/or extended techniques on instruments, is a sort of timbral dissonance which dilutes the pitch perception of a musical sound. Teodorescu-Ciocanea describes inharmonicity as the combination of frequencies that are not integral multiples of the funda
Read more

Haba's field shifting - and the expansion of traditional functional harmony

Image
Hába characterizes the quarter-tone gamut as separated into two fields, one half comprising the twelve conventional pitches, and the other half, shifting all the twelve notes by a quarter-tone, the twelve quarter-tone pitches. In harmony, Passages occur in which chords composed purely of conventional pitches alternate with chords composed purely of quarter-tone pitches. Two fields are not always rejecting each other when he equally divided a perfect 4th (5 semitones)into 2 equal intervals, equal 2.5 for each, the 0.5 quartertones always step into the other field. Sometimes, this fourth interval can be further divided into 2.5+2+0.5 or other permutations. This kind of splitting a fourth can be traced to ancient greek tetrachord, a scale of four notes, bounded by the interval of a perfect fourth. A chord across both fields, the chord spell like a flatter dominant 7th chord. the 7th harmonic on harmonic series is quite flat (-31cents). This chord combines both fields sounds better accordi
Read more

Temperament, Tuning, and Timbre -- the underrated trinity in music

 The trinity here is not about the Christianity faith, but similar to the idea of the Christian doctrine of it defines God as being one God existing in three coequal, the core and fundamental definition, temperament, tuning, and timbre (TTT) are the basic building blocks of music, yet, underrated and even neglected in our music education system. TTT correlates with each other. A note is played, it carries out a series of frequencies, the harmonic series. The series multiples from the fundamental frequency with a series of integers (1f 2f 3f 4f 5f 6f 7f 8f 9f 10f 11f 12f 13f...). The loudness of individual particles, and different patterns, creates different timbres. View the series in a different way, the combination of the integers creates intervals. The combination of the beginning of the series sounds more harmonious and vice versa; simple ratios sound pure and vice versa. The pure perfect 5th interval is based on the ratio of 2:3 (2nd and 3rd harmonics at the same time), Pytheogoro
Read more