Some Music Composition Notes

[11 April 2000, driving]

I have been and am writing song-cycles based on Tarot, deities, saints, aliens, etc. Now: Write other song-cycles, based on other myths. Yeah, and... Minimal techno hip-hop. Synthetic rhythm, MIDI guitar doing organ sounds, other sounds, in a hip-hop-type beat, with techno-ambient background noise at various speeds, uh *way* slowed down... hmm, a car-crash, way slowed down... with dog-barking sounds... a lot of that I could do with just guitar, synth, MIDI interface, computer, tape & minidisc recorders, sound-effects CDs. Still, it'd be *awful* good to have a portastudio to assemble it all on... Soundtracks for imaginary movies, for imaginary TV shows, imaginary plays, imaginary ballets... a score for walking down the street. Not just music for airports - music for shopping, music for barbershops — nope, I don't use barbershops. But at least, music for *getting* barbered. Music for real-estate deals. Music for dentistry. Music for voting. Music for beading. Music for bicycling thru a bad neighborhood...

Setup slow recurrent rhythmnic bass patterns, play repetitive 2-3-4-chord folk-melody patterns on top, morph the rhythm into a different rhythm... HA! Do minimal techno hip-hop hymns, old hymn- music so arranged... Take recordings of sacred music from around the world, chants of East India, North American Indians, Eastern Orthodoxoi, Zen chants, and techno-ize'em... record ambient sounds of grocery stores, big-box retailers, burger stands, and techno-ize those... a strategy for doing that, using a portastudio, would be to take the ambient sound, uh the basic background, let's see, so, a long chant, a walk thru CostCo — overdub that, on another track, with playing tabla, playing rhythm along, maybe even using synthesized rhythm to set a steady metronomish pace... then overlay the tracks of guitar, bass, et cetera. And sound effects. Dark and edgy — do a lot of it dark'n'edgy. Do some of it *bright*'n'edgy too, but, edgy... Get back out on Hippie Hill with the minidisc recorder... Of course, that's not exactly gonna be minimal edgy techno, but it'll be some interesting sounds, to overlay melodic/harmonic structures onto.

Go back on the quest for railyards at night. Techno-industrial noise, how d'ya get techno- industrial noise without being deafened? How d'ya get techno-industrial noise out in the suburbs — the only noises out here are cars and trucks, for the most part, or busses — I dunno, go out to the airport? That's still just internal-combustion engines. 'Industrial' shoould mean, big clanging machines. Construction sites with pile-drivers? Definately tape ambient sounds of the annual show out at the airport, the county airport, Peanuts International. Lower a mike into a stormdrain, a culvert under or near a roadway, with intermittant traffic, get the resonances of the rumbles. Or get to a quiet culvert, mike it, make sounds around there and get the resonance, the echoes. Where'd I see a shotgun mike? I saw a shotgun mike somewhere. Hey, for that matter, take the parabolic mike, hook it up to a tape deck, minidisk recorder.

But where? In the City? In a park? On the front porch as traffic goes by, as kids are out there playing on weekends? Which ambient sounds are worth recording? It's a little trickier than just, than photography, videography. There you can look at the images, y'can frame something, [CLICK] got it! It's much harder, framing sounds, outside sounds, exterior sounds, ambient sounds... still [unintelligible] to do the interior sounds, too much interior sound is 60-cycle hum. Now, interior sounds of non- electrified spaces, that's what to go for. Which leads back to using the inside of the RV as a recording studio. So which is a better studio space? Inside the RV, in the sewing room, or out on the back porch? And if in the RV, where? Out in the back yard? Out on the beach? Out in the Smoke Creek Desert? In the desert, outside?

Continuing that thought: Record in the desert, outside, on a windless day. On a windy day, even the inside is too noisy. But out in the desert, hook up the tape/minidisk to a radio, shortwave, AM, and record the far-off music, music from the Indian stations.

Essences of music: rhythm, harmony, melody. Interactions - I can play melody in the lower and/or upper harmonics, or overtones... How to do that with the rhythm? How to play rhythms in higher, what, higher and/or lower counterbeats? Superimpose two or more rhythms, um subtract the bases, just leave the interactions? Is there a 4th dimension of music? Assuming that melody, harmony, rhythm are the 3 dimensions, all working in a matrix of time. As length, breadth, width - length, depth, width - work in a matrix of time in 4-dimensionsal space-time. What's the parallel for music? What's the parallel of higher dimensions? Or at least, more complex dimensions? I dunno - extended dimensions? Folded-up, collapsed? As in, superstring theory?

So, I can simplify the occupation of space-time by dropping-out intervals in any of the 3 spatial dimensions, uh instead of filling-up some entire dimension, leave holes. Uh as the beboppers with jazz, with silences, taking a melodic structure and leaving holes in it, y'know, very *brief* silences, but they're there. Or leaving blank spaces in a visual matrix. So take parallels of that in music. In space. In time. Is there a quantum theory of music, of art, uh can creativity come only in spurts, in quanta? The products of that creativity? And how can it be manipulated? The universe, the cosmiverse, the musiverse! The extra dimension of music is like the extra dimension(s) of space-time - it's consciousness, the immaterial realm of what people do in their minds to give meaning to it. OK, that's all nice, and it may be true, but it's trivial, can't do anything with it. For a theoretical construct, I need to have something that I can use as a base for further exploration.

Taking a parallel of melody, and uh harmony, of adding intervals to a harmony to work in the upper overtones, uh, extrapolating on that into rhythm, how do we get into higher rhythms? Except begin to take a couple of patterns, put them against each other, note the interference patterns, mask out the basic patterns and just leave the interference, the sums and differences. That's one way. Another way would be, using the serialist approach of Total Control, in this case taking, specifying a rhythmic pattern, and then lopping-out instances of it every now'n'then. Maybe that's not as much 'serialist' as 'reductive', minimalist, whatever. The name isn't important there. Those are just a couple of rhythmic approaches.

So with the first instance, the interference patterns, it'd be like taking a march beat and a waltz beat (this is a very tribial example, but it gives the idea) — take the two, where they overlap, eliminate those beats, and only retain the differences. In the second instance, second example, it's like taking a fairly complex samba beat, and arbitrarily removing every 3rd beat, or every 3rd then every 4th then every 3rd then every 4th, like that. That'd be something like a subtractive hocket, where each note, or each beat, is happening on a different instrument, with a different voice, from a different place, and we use a pattern to subtract some of those beats, some of those notes. So that, that beat, that note, that element, is suggested by its absense.

It'd be very easy to treat well-known melodies that way - just remove every 3rd note, leave the space in there - or not! Edit-out the space too! Hmm, then it gets *really* compressed. And chaotic. So there's a couple of approaches there - uh, there's stifling, muffling, silencing a note, but leaving its beat in; or, removing the beat too. And doing the removal not on a *beat* basis, but on a *note* basis. So the first of those would leave the tempo intact, the second would radically change the tempo. If we take the same melody, play it on different voices per note, and use different subtraction schemes per each voice, then then play them over each other, um, or after each other, fugue-like, so that they eventually all end superimposed, it could be an interesting effect.

Using interference patterns in a melodic approach, could do something like taking two melodies, selected for, working in the same key, maybe even simpler, similar tempo, overlaying them, and then again, only playing the differences, retaining the differences, dropping-out any notes that are the same in the two melodies at the same place. Or use that for a 3-part hocket, where the identities play on one voice, maybe raised and/or lowered an octave, and the differences play on separate voices, all spatially separated. And rotating. Heh heh.

Something similar in the harmonic realm, say, would be taking, say, two similar hymns, playing them, the entire chord structures, or superimposing the chord structures, and removing all identities, and just leaving the differences, on different channels. And/or with the identities transformed and put on yet another channel. That transformation, indeed, might be in terms of changing them by a third or a forth or a fifth, rather than by an octave. All sorts of possibilities there.

Techo-ambient soundtrack: block out or map the timing of a potential movie; determine how long every scene is, what kind of music would be needed for that cut; how long each CUE would be. Ah, have a soundtrack that is through-composed with a consistant beat, y'know it's the hiphop-techno beat going throughout, but with the emphases and melodic riffs and such based at the, the blocked-out cuts or cues.

In new music: percussive vocals.

Doing the Music! Some Notes

[6 Sept 2002 - driving]

Dig up my tapes, I think I recorded tapes at the Barstow rail yards — digitize those and see what I can do with those sounds. If they aren't good enough, go back to Barstow and record the music of the railyards again some night. And the Hippie Hill percussion tapes, of course. Or see about hooking-up a MIDI synthesizer to a computer like I have in years past. Or even, I suppose I could just use the soundcard onboard one of the laptops, and write BASIC programs that send MIDI data streams to the soundcard in weird and unusual rhythmic patterns and [electronic noise] ... I can't play that much with frequencies, MIDI deals with specific notes, can't bend the pitches that much, easily ... but see what kind of, how that works as a music composition tool for me. Yeah, compose more; schmooze around the Web less, huh? Huh huh, sure.

Well, if I get the network set up correctly, with the Compaq as the primary network server, it could also be ther driver for the, either it or the Monorail could be the driver for the CD burner [electronic noise] and collect a lot of music and burn it onto CDs. Play it. Enjoy it. Jawohl!

And of course get the analog synths set up again for generating [electronic noise] ... This may require that I acquire a fairly decdent mixing panel [GOT IT!]. But also a fairly small one. I wonder if I can haunt some pawnshops and find an old PortaStudio with a mixing panel on it? That would do. 'Cause the hallmark of thre new regime is that all the equipment has to be SMALL. I can't have the same kind of clutter of stuff that I had in my old ha! ha! Electronic Music Studio. In the new one, the biggest things should be the synths and keyboards. Everything else - recorders, mixers, processors, speakers - should be as small as possible, if not more so. Because that stuff should be easily portable, transportable in the RV anyway. So I wouldn't be taking large keyboards or the analog synths into the RV, but everything else, yeah. And see if I can devise an electronic music studio that all fits into one bag. That would be with minidisc recorder of course, not CD burners.

Something else to do: compile more of my old music notes, put them online. I realize than in some cases that's going to mean scanning them, putting the images up, or portions of the images.

OK, I've been thinking about ways to do music programming in BASIC, although if I can find resources for synthetic programming in other languages I can deal with, like C or TCL/TK or whatever, I wouldn't mind exploring those. But, ah, what's the problem here? The problem is, what model do I use for employing the computer language to produce sounds, whether strings of MIDI information, or absolute tonal control and [electronic noise] commands, et cetera?

And it seems to me that one model, I could trace the evolution of software. Spaghetti codes. So, I could write a music program as a flowchart, each step examines conditions and change values and mix many bytes [electronic noise] ... Do it as a series of loops, in which case, what am I looping around? Am I looping around time? Am I looping around channel? Am I looping around note? And that's the problem I had when I tried to deal with this in the past, trying to think about this, thinking about ways to have loops generate various information to generate sounds. But this would necessarily have each loop running in a separate virtual machine, and I still don't know any language that can do that, that I can setup all these machines to be running simultaneously.

So I've already written about designs for programs that, say, examine graphic images and emit sounds based on the byte patterns in the images. Or similarly, that examine text and generate sounds based on the characters in that text file. And my old idea of having a virtual reality world with little music machines that hang around inside that virtual reality and their interactions generate sounds. Something even simpler that just occurred to me, and I'm not sure if I've considered this before, I may have, is in essence to have a Game-of-Life-type music machine, where every cell that's alive in the new generation emits a sound of a certain tone on a certain channel.

Now, those last few ideas are about looping, they're heirarchical control stuff, built within loops. The next step beyond that might be OBJECT-ORIENTED - I'd still be working within loops, but now what's being looped-around are the movements of code-objects, exchanging information and generating sounds as a result of that.

So now my problem is, how do I come up with some novel way of generating interesting sounds with more modern equipment, but especially considering that I just haven't been keeping up with what's been done lately, either in hardware or software?

And of course there's the old idea of taking data of some sort and using that as the basis for synthesis, the EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD model of composition. But a more modern, network way of doing that might be to have a program or script that PINGs a number of InterNet addresses and depending on what results it gets from the pinging, generate sounds. Or, have a Web Spider that goes out looking for sound files and grabs them and mixes them, kinda like some program I used to have running on my Compaq that looked at all the sound files on that computer and played them in a randomized way. I kinda liked that.

But yeah, go pinging the Net and see what happens, but not just pinging, pull out that book on hacking and see what some of the hacking and anti-hacking tools are, some of the programs for probing addresses and see what kind of results they return, and use those as the basis for selecting MIDI myte strings to send to a synthesizer.

But somehow, all that feels kind of OLD WAVE. I'll have to see what software tools are now available. What would be really nice would be if there is something that is, oh like these game engines, I'd like to have a sound engine that I could write scripts under, something maybe not as imposing, so hard to work with as MAX, some of the total-sound-control programs. Just some y'know plug-in console that, an API, a music API that, duh, I dunno what I'm trying to say...

Fock it. I'm too tired to think straight. It's Friday evening, almost, just after sunset, and I've been... I started 'way before sunrise this morning, and it's been wearying, yup.

WALKING: Music Manifestos

[20 September 2002, strolling]

I'm walking along Buckhorn Ridge Road, on my every-other-day long walk. Ah, today walking downhill towards Pioneer Park, listening to a Fresh Air interview with one of the founders of the Mekons — g'z, I have a single by the Mekons, I rather liked that very murky stuff from the late 70s, early 80s, early 80s I think, I remember buying that in some little record shop on Grant Avenue, upper Grant.

Greil Marcus called the Mekons the band that carried the punk philosophy to its logical conclusion: those who CAN'T play can learn, and those who CAN play can forget.

So this leader of the Mekons is now in the US, into country swing, does Bob Wills tributes; has a band, the Waco Brothers; satirizes comercial country music; talks about the parallels between early country and country swing, and early punk, very individualistic stuff. Rogers, Jimmy Rogers, Hank Williams, and on up thru George Jones — parallels between them and early punk, and how the musical forms are similar. Very simple musical structures, although the differences are that country has often been about songcraft, and punk really hasn't.

Ah, behond that, he was talking about the early days of the Mekons, and how they had RULES. They issued a MANIFESTO. And that's why I'm dictating this right now. They had a mainfesto. They were gonna be totally non-commercial, they hated the commercial rock of the time. So they wouldn't make a record, they wouldn't get their pictures taken, they'd play slow songs instead of fast punk songs, they'd only be a supporting band. Of course they had to break all those rules in order to get any records made. In the course of 25 years thay had, what, 18 different labels, some of which were themselves. So, how much good that philosophy did, I don't know. BUT, that gets back to MANIFESTO. Should a band have a manifesto? Sure, why not? Should all musicians have manifestos? Sure, why not? Should *I* write a musical manifesto? Hey, of course! No problem, I can think of something.

So what would BE in this manifesto? How about:

Music, like any art, can have many functions. It can be challenging. It can be hypnotizing. It can be wallpaper. It can be pushing you to something or away from something. It can be accepting. The kind of music you want to make, and you do make, reflects what goes on inside you, your interior states.

Similarly, commerce can be challenging or accepting, or hypnotizing. It can be driven totally by greed, or by desires to maximize the gains of all parties involved. And how you do commerce reflects your interior states.

However, putting art and commerce together — that is, the music business — generally requires stifling some of those possibilities, limiting the range of functions and attributes.

So the musical artist has to make a choice: Do I want to make a lot money by ripping off peoples' minds? Or survive by doing something that's acceptable but not exploitative? Or do what you want and see what happens, even if it means keeping a day job? And again, the choices made reflect the artists' interior states.

Music may consist of: rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, lyrics. One or many of those may be absent from any specific performance. The job of the musical artist is to select among those and work with'em.

The artist-musician may be involved in any of a number of social, political, ideological movements, or may not. Such involvement also reflects interior states. The artist has a number of possible choices about what and who and how and when they ingest. Again, such choices reflect their interior states.

So, all the above items could be laid out on a matrix. And the possible interior states of the artist can be laid out on a matrix. And one can be applied to the other - the states can be applied to the artistic-commercial factors matrix.

The artist then can decide - what the hell kind of person are you? And what good are you doing for yourself and those around you, for the greater community, for the world at large? And do you give a shit?

More:

The artist can reflect interior states, exterior states, fantasy states - what's around them, their real or virtual environments. Artists can choose what's around them - city, country, industrial wasteland, ocean, suburb, farm, forest, institution, incarceration, liberation.

Artists can portray, mirror, reflect, depict, distort, exemplefy, attack, support, be neutral to those environments (I don't know, is it possible to be neutral towards anything around you?)

Artists can choose a scale - small, medium, large, extreme, infinite, infinitesimal, anything in between on a vast continuum.

But the artist MUST reflect some emotion; else, why bother? Unless of course one's goal is to produce emotionless art. In which case, why should anyone pay any attention?

And that's the basis of that manifesto — I'll see if I can work any more on it later.