Searching for New Sound - Music Composition ideas

 A composer who could write music from European, Central Asia, India, Korea, Japan, North Africa, South Asia tradition and where the local musicologists or musicians praise his understanding of the local culture. He could improvise based on Indian rag, performing with the ensemble of Japanese gagaku (court music). He was Alan Hovhaness (1911 – 2000), an American-Armenian composer. He was one of the most prolific 20th-century composers. His music was full of inspiration from the East. I don't know him until recently. He did not catch any frame until his mid-composition career and lots of his early composition was destroyed by himself. It is hard to trace his music in his early period and give a solid conclusion of why his music did not catch public attention. At the time of the early-mid 20th century, the general composers in America didn't have a deep understanding of Eastern culture. The US composer either fellowed the traditional European tradition, jazz, or went experientia...

 Mixolydian mode is often referred to as a medieval church mode and can be traced to ancient Greece. For composing, to bring out the taste of the mode, the melody should accent the flat-seven note in the mode. Thus, the tunning of the note flat-seven is critical. I have discussed the 53-TET is great for perfect 5th. This 26 TET is great for minor 7th. Harmonic series again, the just intonation of minor 7th is way flatter than the 12-TET that we normally use, -31 cent, about a quarter semitone. Finding an alternative temperament is needed. In the harmonic series, the 7th harmonics is the minor 7th interval to the fundamental. The 4th and 7th are the interval of minor 7th in the same octave. The ratio of 7:4 sounds harmonious in just intonation, as the ratio is from the harmonic series. There are also other ratios of minor 7th in the harmonic series, e.g. 9:5, 16:9, etc. Harmonic series in C Borrowing the same method by Pytheogoen, but we stack in 7:4 minor 7th interval instead. Aft...

EQ stands for Equalization, which is a device intended to manipulate the frequency content. It can boost or bring down certain frequencies. Every instrument plays has its own harmonic series pattern and overtones above it. Massing the harmonic series around with the EQ can alter the timbre of a note, isolating, boosting, dampen certain frequencies, resulting in different timbre. The pure data patch below randomly isolates the harmonic partials, which sound like playing harmonics at a very fast speed.

 The first piece that I encountered Alvin Lucier's music was his Music For Solo Performer. The performer sits still on a chair and wearable devices capture the brain wave of the performer. The brain wave transfers to an electronic signal and makes sound on acoustic instruments. This is unique in that in most performances we see, the performer has all sorts of movements and gestures. (Also read my previous article  and music for the deaf .) Apart from his Music for Solo Performer, Lucier works a lot with sound installation e.g. Music On A Long Thin Wire, and manipulating sound samples e.g. I Am Sitting in a Room. The human gestures element is mostly erased which benefits the audience by focusing the movement of sound (air particle) and the movement (vibration) of the mechanical part. In his installation, Music On A Long Thin Wire, the wire is extended across a large room, clamped to tables at both ends. The ends of the wire are connected to the loudspeaker terminals of a p...

The heterophonic texture in Chinese music, with all instruments playing the same melody, have a great effect of combining the timbre of an individual instrument. Since each instrument has its own pattern of harmonic series. In the case of Chinese folk instruments, each instrument sounds quite special and unique. Chinese characterize the instruments into 8 categories: metal, stone, string, bamboo, gourd, clay, leather, wood. When different instruments are combined within the same melody,  This kind of oneness was further expanded to one note. In his Quattro pezzi su una nota sola ("Four Pieces on a single note", 1959) his best-known technique for having composed music based around only one pitch, altered in all manners through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and changes in timbre and dynamics. With different instruments add-in or drop-out, the timbre is constantly changing even though there is only one note. Similar to heterophony in Chinese music, instruments pla...

 Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill and bizarre images in his work. He was one of the leaders of contemporary art. His works are technical refine and at the same time full of creativity and imagination. How did he get all the inspiration? As I am a composer, sound artist, it is helpful to learn from him. The Great Masturbator (1929). oil on canvas, 110 cm × 150 cm., Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Dalí used sleeping to help him get inspired. By holding a metallic object in his hand as he drifted off on a comfy chair, as he lost consciousness and dropped the object, the noise would jerk him awake. Dalí used this half-asleep state to get inspired and create his masterpieces.  Recent research by National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris prove his method works. The research team asked 103 people to carry out the maths task, they found that when fall asleep they may spend a few minutes in a state c...

Chicken tikka masala and fortune cookies are iconic dishes that were invented away from the cultural origin. Chicken tastes amazing and cookies are wrapped with wisdom. The chicken tikka masala sauce and its prep meal are very popular and can be found in every supermarket. It is more likely, it is derived from butter chicken, a popular dish in northern India. The masala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy. In short, the use of spices and serving the gray, synthesis two diverse cultures but get along well together, using food as the bridge of different cultures. As the portraying the eastern culture, it is successful to promote the Indian culture. Fortune cookies are often served as a dessert in Chinese restaurants in the West, but they may or may not be Chinese in origin or maybe in Japan. The origin is debatable. The interesting part of fortune cookies is not the cookies themselves, just a kind of vanilla cookies. The con...