Today I had a look at pd. This is a great piece of software! I am thrilled!
I experimented a while with it and designed a simple random walk. I decided to do many versions of it by making it more interesting in each vesion.
Here is the first version:
And here is the sound of a finite trajectory.
In the 2nd version I did the addition more elegantly (with respect to the operation sequence):
Many versions will follow!…
[I will stop the guitar project for a while because of other priorities.]
In the last year (or years) I was thinking of composing music in a totally different style than I did before. Five years long I did not compose music, I was engaged in composing poems, but I made many thoughts about composition. Unfortunately I did not have the time (among other necessities) to work on the ideas that I had. The study of mathematics and other reasons prevented me from doing so.
Now the situation is much more worse. I work (earning money) and parallel I work on my dissertation which has to be given in September. This is exactly the situation for me to seek a way out for the body and the mind.
For the latter, composing is here again! The ones that liked my music before 2002 will be possibly disappointed; for my new style there are no scores and the music may seem too simple or too… I don’t know. I do not mind, because —as always— I only care, if the art I create satisfies me.
The new pieces (5 small poems) are available at the composition section “Second Berlin Period“.
SInce January I learn to play the guitar. I am a beginner; I can play any chords but very slowly, and all major and minor scales. I like in this instrument its gentle and quiet sound.
The goal of this project will be a piece for solo guitar. It should be so difficult, that it should possible to be played by myself. It should use the trivial melodic material of the chromatic scale. The rhythm should also be simple. The piece should prefer homogeneity rather than contrast. Contrast should exist in the middle form, in the manner of (self) dialogue, it should not occur as two opposite aspects.
These were some general axioms, but they say nothing about the long form. The piece should have the form of a great chromatic scale, which has its local peaks and lows and generally begins around a and ends in the high register of the instruments. It should present in this manner the whole range of the guitar. It will not be a great crescendo. The many local ups and downs should be unpredictable in contrast to the general trend (upwards).
The middle trend should not be monotone increasing (from the bottom, to the top), but it should have its peaks and lows as well. This scope is the key structure that will make the piece interesting; it will balance between the unpredictability of the local motion and the simplicity of the general one.
The unpredictability of the local motion will be determined by selected randomness, using discrete trajectories of stochastic processes. I will use mathematics and computer programming. But I do not want to risk producing great masses. Programming can be great instrument in producing large amount of data, but I am a lover of small structures and detail.
The duration of the piece should be ≈10 minutes.
Composing is an adventure. You draw plans, you go for it, change direction, take decisions, and one day you reach a point. This point may not be the one that you wanted to reach. It could be disappointing or much more better than that you had dreamed of. But in any case, the adventure is of great interest as the goal itself.
Of course the above statement holds not only for composing music, but for every task that lasts, and therefore demands good planning: proving of mathematical theorems, writing poems, constructing a machine etc. But here, as a composer, I am going to talk about composing.
In the next posts, I will set the goal, and plan the ways to get there. I will describe my thoughts and explain my decisions. I will document every step in the composition process. I hope that I will find the time and the power for this quite demanding attempt.
