Composers combine notes. That’s all.
— Igor Stravinsky
musical composition
All posts tagged musical composition
This piece is really intended for cello and piano. But the Sibelius robot’s cello sound is unbearable, hence the instrumentation change. I’ll try the cello robot once I get some better sounds installed.
My current homework is to write a scherzo (ABA or ABA’), with this as the introduction.
zipTimer: an app for pacing your daily music practice!
I’ll post an update soon. My composition teacher made some suggestions which I think will much improve this piece.
The process: I started out with a written-out six measure improvisation for cello. That melody constitutes the first six measures of the bassoon part. Then, on a long plane ride a few weeks later, I wrote counterpoint to the melody to get the oboe started. As best I recall, I would extend the oboe line for a while, then extend the bassoon line. At some point I decided to have fun with the little bit of imitation in measures 10 and 11.
Performance: the Sibelius robot
zipTimer: an app for pacing your daily music practice.
I’ve been working with HH on some interesting problems in musical synthesis — just having fun, not breaking new ground. We’ve worked up a small command line program, sf2a, which transforms solfa syllables into audio files. These were monophonic “compositions”, e.g. e do do q re do fa mi — two eighth notes followed by four quarter notes, a recognizable melody:-) It suffices to say
% sf2a 'allegro: e do do q re do fa mi' -o happy % play happy.wav
to play this melody. Or you could say just sf2a 'allegro: e do do q re do fa mi' -p to have the melody played forthwith.
It occurred to us that it would be interesting to be able to do the same with multi-voice compositions. A minimal example would be something like
voice1: w mi re voice2: w do_ sol_
Both voices move in whole notes. The second is an octave below the first. The solution to this little problem is amazingly simple and elegant. Intermediate files representing the sampled waveforms for voice1 and voice2 are generated. Think of them as representing columns of numbers. So we just add corresponding numbers together to make a third column. This is the sampled waveform for the two voices played together. Of course we all learned that in high-school physics: the superposition principle at work!
Here are the audio files:
voice1: E D + voice 2: C G = Counterpoint!
For the code, see HH’s blog, or our github repository.
zipTimer: an app for pacing your music practice – or any practice!
Elegy for Glen (click for full score)
Elegy for Glen, a composition for two cellos, dedicated to my father, Glen Carlson (August 15, 1923 – March 30, 2009).
Computer rendition. One day there will be a human performance:-)
Circle and Square 