Friday, January 21, 2011

text to music as a true form of algorithmic music

Text to music in my op-ion is another true form of algorithmic music that needs to explored more by the avant garde artists. It's algorithmic in its musical structure as of that the notes are predetermined by the letters of the text but everything else is up to the composer. This is a call to all to open and explore this form of music art and start creating and share your works of art. if you brave unuff to take these steps and create music under this style of algorithmic music then let us share it with other. text to music is a experimental sound art that shouldn't be ignored. here is a site that allows you to explore it that online.



www.p22.com/musicfont/

Again save you creations in midi format as the site allows and share it with others. 

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Scott Raposa: "The Gem Bay" The Algorithmic & generative music video

This is a Great little video produced by Scott Raposa back in 2009. blending together visuals and sound through the use of   Algorithms & generative systems.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

More on theory of creating canons in computer generated music


After posting on the concept of creating the same forms you find when scoring a canon but in computer generated music system. I revised a email on the subject. I thought it was a interesting view on the subject. So I thought I share it with the readers of the blog.

The response was sent by “Bohgosity BumaskiL

Changing quarter notes to eighth notes, and the rest of the notes in the
same proportion is the same as changing tempo. Similarly, scaling pitches up
or down (multiplying all pitches in hertz by the same frequency) will yield
an identical tune (in a different key). Augmentation is something you can do
to fifths and fourths without offending terminology purists. A perfect fifth
is 3:2. A classic augmented fifth is 25:16 (24:16 would be perfect). Your
use of "Diminution" is also about tempo. I am glad you are defining
inversion for me, because that is what I thot it means, and it provides
validation for a just intonation (tuning on the harmonic series) I promoted
in June (inverting it and scaling it by an octave work out to the same
thing, except on one key).

I've used fractint to get algorithmic music. Some of the best of what I've
heard comes from a "hopalong" fractal. It was called "the wizard".
Unfortunately, fractint works best under DOS, and I hav not even tested
whether winfract does sound. It does not handle skew, among other things.

One of my criticisms of fractint is that it adheres to 12TET, and I do not
know what to do about that. The alternative is perhaps as simple as scaling,
adding, and rounding. Perhaps I can add a third way for fractint to quantize
pitches. The first way is NO quantization, and I will hav you note that "The
Wizard" is quantized -- in a weird way, though: All of the quantizations are
powers of two.
_______
http://www.fractint.org/

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The connection between Musical Scales and Modular Arithmetic



Pythagoras' musical scale is based on a geometric sequence and can be viewed as a type of modular arithmetic. Whenever we get out of the ratio interval 1 to 2, we divide by a power of two to find out the corresponding number within the interval.

In Pythagoras' scale the ratio of 3:2 corresponds to the fifth note (V) in the scale.

Looking in terms of the scale numbers,since note VIII is like the first note I, we can view the numbering of these scale notes has a modular system with modulo number 7 just like how a clock is a modular system with a of modulo 12.

Understanding that we can identify the first tone I with 0,II with 1 …, VII is 6.
Therefore the tone ( V ) is adding 4 and modulo 7. Understanding the way modular arithmetic works and it's direct connection in the way scales are shaped. Can lead to better computer based scale creation systems.

Data Sound Conceptual Project

The Data Sound project is looking for algorithmic musician's and artist's to share there sounds and visual art. Wether you convert text to music, ascii art into sound art or you create software applications that generate musical scores based of a set of algorithmic rules.

 We like you to consider contributing to this project. The Goal is to get a DVD worth of music/visuals showcasing different techniques and concepts. 

If your interested in getting involved, please just leave a comment and we will be posting more this project has it grows..

Thanks to everyone...

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Creating Retrograde Melodies in Auto-Generated Music System


In designing a canon style musical composition one of the variations that is widely used is what is called retrograde. retrograde means to play the melody backwards so I will show a simple way of producing it through use of the ruby language. Again this can be done in any programming language I have just chosen ruby for this article.

The first thing is to create the notes of the musical composition. In this example we will just randomly generate a pattern based off a given scale. Like a Major scale in the ruby language it would be something like this

major=[0,2,4,5,7,9,11,12] # C D E F G A B C

64.times { melody << major[rand(major.size)] }

The above code will generate a 64 note song. Now that we have all the notes generated for the composition.
Now it's time to create a retrograde version of the melody.

Retrograde is the simplest of the canon techniques to create do to the fact that retrograde means to play the melody in reverse. The ruby language gives us a simple built in method to do this called believe it or not "reverse" so to create the retrograde version of the melody can be produced with one line of code.

retrograde_melody = melody.reverse

now you can assign the retrograde version array to its own midi channel.

Take note this doesn't take in count the duration that the note is played for each note which can be changed in various ways and will be tackled in future articles. This is just to retrograde the original melody in it's raw form.

If you like to play around with the code and software that this article is based off of check it out from my github at https://github.com/Gabrielg1976/Ruby-Scale-and-Chord-System.git . all you need to run the application is to have ruby installed which can be found here http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ and a gem called midlib 1.0 which is a ruby based midi library which can be grabbed after you have ruby install by going to terminal and typing

gem install midlib

I hope that you will explore this concept more on your own and share your thoughts and ideas on this subject.