Tag: algorithms

What’s the difference between music as art and music as entertainment or decoration?

There is a clear relation in this question to an earlier post which offers a definition of art. I posed the question to myself in this form after…

making sense of: recording

On July 20th 2023, with the help of Jorge Vallejo, Karin Schistek and I recorded my solo piano piece making sense of at the Folkwang University’s Tonaufnahmestudio. There…

in competence: algorithms

Anyone who knows my work can guess that in competence was substantially made with my slippery chicken algorithmic composition software. A lot of free-form editing and development of score…

soundscapes around the world

Over the spring and summer of 2020 my students and I worked on a four-channel soundscapes installation that created a continuously remixed and varying aural collage of sound…

vivos: automatic unattended real-time processing of audio signals in maxmsp and common lisp

  vivos as a noun means alive in Spanish and Portuguese; living in Latin; but also tips its hat at the 1980 computer music landmark Mortuos Plango, Vivos…

gold im bach

  The title gold im bach arose from a discussion I had with Karin Schistek during a trip in summer 2019 to Camogli, near Genoa, Italy. I had…

ma bel

ma bel, my new piece for Jean-Francois Laporte’s compressed-air instrument, the babel table, was premiered in Canada at the Conservatoire de Musique de MontrĂ©al on October 4th 2019….

orchestration algorithm in
“days with glass edges”

  days with glass edges (chasing the butterflies in my wallpaper), for fifteen-piece ensemble and 4-channel electronics, was premiered at the NOW! Festival by the Folkwang Modern ensemble…

Premiere of Durchhaltevermögen in Münster

In May 2018 I was in MĂĽnster with edimpro colleagues Dimitris Papageorgiou and Karin Schistek to give improvisation workshops to students at the Hochschule fĂĽr Musik. Mieko Kanno…

HOTPO

On July 12th 2018, Portuguese saxophonist Henrique Portovedo premiered HOTPO, my new piece for alto saxophone, ensemble, and electronics. The performance was part of the World Saxophone Congress…

hyperboles 3 in Montreal

Quasar Quartet, Le Gesu, Montreal, Canada, 19/1/17:   It was disappointingly warm in Montreal. I’d promised Martin temperatures of -20C and below (it reached -33C on my last trip)…

for rei as a doe: the making of the video: an online interview with the artists

Below is an interview I initiated online with the artists who made the above video to my algorithmic composition for rei as a doe. CI = Chante Inglis (animation)…

for rei as a doe, with video, in Genova

I’ve just returned from teaching algorithmic composition for a week at the Conservatorio Statale di Musica “Niccolò Paganini” in Genova, Italy. It was a pleasure to meet and work with Professor…

Control Waves and Guest Professorship at the Folkwang University, Essen

I’m just coming to the end of my second week of teaching in the Institute for Computer Music and Electronic Media (ICEM) at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen,…

Bangkok Thoughts: post-concert Q&A

Whilst searching online forY/Our Music, Salee Art Every’s excellent film about Thai  music, I stumbled across a complete recording of the post-concert question and answer session we did at Museum…

piano music and cross-staff notation

Anyone who has input a piano score into notation software knows that it’s not so easy as, say, creating a woodwind part. First of all there are chords,…

premiere of hyperboles 5, Birmingham

  Ellen Fallowfield and I outed the latest version of my hyperboles project last weekend at the Crosscurrents Festival in Birmingham. After two days of intense rehearsals and development it…

using auto-sequence to order chords: part 1

slippery chicken’s automatic chord sequencing algorithm creates an ordering for a set-palette’s sets (or chords) based on user-given dissonance and spectral centroid envelopes. The terms set and chord…

using auto-sequence to order chords: part 2

Back to part 1 auto-sequence examples and analysis The following examples process a set-palette created from a harmonic reduction by Emilios Cambouropoulos of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End…

The use of Reaper and MIRA in jitterbug

jitterbug is a four-movement four-channel work/album for computer, with or without improvising musicians. It is documented more generally but in detail in another blog post. Here I’m going…

jitterbug

(aka four views of a rhythmic-structural procedure based on iterated proportions of 6:3:5:4)     jitterbug is a four-movement four-channel work/album for computer, with or without improvising musicians….

Music for Parallel Consumption: An open-ended self-reconfiguring musical composition as app

Composed in 2010 but not released until some final polish was applied in 2015, Music for Parallel Consumption is a 4-channel digital composition made for delivery and playback via a custom…

Keep it Simple: Complex Rhythmic Notation in Common Lisp

No, this isn’t a polemic against complex rhythmic notation or the New Complexity. Since the 80s I’ve been a fan of such music, even if as a composer…

Music for Parallel Consumption

  Update, January 2016: This project has now been released on bandcamp It’s a lovely word but a little overused by self-help and marketing gurus: serendipity. Those familiar…

hyperboles 4 – the extremities of cold, Montreal

My hyperboles project saw a new iteration in Quebec last month. Performances of  hyperboles 4 (“insomniac rain”) took place in Canada, on February 25th courtesy of the festival Mois Multi 2015…

Lisp Code to generate double harmonics

In response to Russell Snyder’s request for my code to generate double harmonics (natural) on the viola d’amore, I’ve abstracted the following from my piece 24-7: freedom fried….

their faces on fire, San Marino

Gianpaolo Antongirolami and I premiered my new piece for baritone saxophone and computer their faces on fire in San Marino on June 20th 2014. It’s 100% algorithmically generated, and…

for rei as a doe

My 40-minute algorithmic composition for piano and computer came out on the Aural Terrains label this month. Rei Nakamura premiered it in London (partial version) and Stockholm (complete version)…

PechaKucha talk

On December 6th 2013, along with some colleagues and old students, I contributed to a PechaKucha evening in Edinburgh devoted to New Music. The 20x20second slide format is a…

Kolam

The self-similar properties of visual patterns generated by Lindenmayer-Systems can be apprehended holistically almost instantaneously. Even simple rules can generate pleasing patterns of the sort you might see…

slippery chicken recordings

A multi-format, surround and stereo recording of five of my compositions made with slippery chicken is now available for order or download. Made possible by a grant from the…

Communications of the ACM article on Algorithmic Composition

In 2009 I was approached by the editor of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery—the world’s oldest computer science journal apparently—to write an article on algorithmic composition….

don’t flinch

Essentially, “don’t flinch” for guitar and computer is a three-part mensural canon, but similar to late Mediaeval and Renaissance isorhythmic techniques, melodic material is repeated along with a…

5.0 mastering with the TC System 6000

To get to know the various dynamics, EQ, and reverb effects on the TC System 6000 I tried a mastering session with the 5.0 mix files of my…