Category Archives: Music

Music and algorithms …

Minimal Lunar Eclipse

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Minimal Lunar Eclipse

This is a minimalist composition inspired by Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” (1967).

It can be performed by two musicians playing the same instrument or two different instruments. The score is simply a bar in 6/8 with 12 sixteenth notes; the tempo should be between 60 and 75 beats per minute.

The measure is repeated continuously at the fixed tempo, but in chunks of increasing length. Initially, only the first note is repeated, then the first two notes, then the first three, and so on. During the performance, the lengths of the chunks played by the two players become different and this can generate interesting and mesmerizing polyrhythms.

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… The Ugliest Album: The Alien Ping

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In a previous post (see here) I talked about “The world’s ugliest music”, a composition made by Scott Rickard using some math techniques in order to minimize the repetitions and the predictability of the sequence of notes. I also made my personal interpretation of the piece using a synthesizer and VCV Rack.

Then I launched a “challenge” on the VCV Community site asking VCV users to give their own interpretation of the ugliest music in an “sci-fi alien context” starting from the MIDI file or a small VCV template with the sequence. Many users accepted the challenge and created very interesting patches (and accompaining videos) … surely if put together they well represent THE UGLIEST ALBUM: The Alien Ping.

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MusiFrog

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… a Musical Frog jumping around a harmonic lake!

The MusiFrog is a simple deterministic algorithm that can be used to produce nice pseudo-random melodies that I discovered while experimenting with generative-music (but perhaps someone else has already found it).

example

It is based on a frog that jumps over a sequence of stones. Each stone has a jump value and is associated with a musical note. Initially the frog is on stone 1 and suppose it has jump value X. The note associated with stone 1 is played, and the frog jumps forward X steps on stone N=1+X; the jump value of stone 1 is increased by 1. Then the note associated with stone N is played, the frog jump forward according to the jump value of the stone which is then incremented by one. The process is repeated and when the frog jumps off the last stone it “wraps-up” and return to the beginning of the sequence.

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