Most of today was spent not enjoying Paris and all her sweet mysteries, but rather playing with this sultry mistress:
Although if we're being brutally honest my finished patch looked more like this:
So what gives? Basically Cassie finishes her bike ride soon, like this Saturday soon. As in two days from now my sister will pedal across the Golden Gate bridge, dip her front tire in the Pacific Ocean and tie a ribbon around 4000 miles and 70 days of constant pedaling. In her honor I wanted to write a little piece of music, something that called to mind a bicycle both in its sound and in its structure.
To achieve this effect I decided to build a system in Max that would let me build a piece based around short, looping samples that can move in and out of phase. If you've ever seen (or heard) Steve Reich's Drumming then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
Reich's piece consists of several drummers playing similar sequences of notes, where each sequence gradually shifts with respect to the other. The effect is of a constantly shifting rhythmical pattern that varies from rigidly in time to syncopated to polyrhythmic to hopelessly chaotic over the course of several minutes. For my piece I also wanted to use short sequences of notes, but I also wanted to control those sequences of notes with sequences of parameters.
Specifically, I might have a note sequence that goes A-B-D-G. I might also have a sequence of control parameters, something like Loud-Soft-Loud. If I play the two in time then the two sequences can combine to produce a third sequence. If a boldfaced note is loud, then that third sequence looks like this:
A-B-D-G-A-B-D-G-A-B...
The whole piece is based around exactly that kind of recombination and phasing, both of melodic elements and of the parameters that control them. You can listen to the end result on my Soundcloud.
 |
| Aw yeah. |
So what gives? Basically Cassie finishes her bike ride soon, like this Saturday soon. As in two days from now my sister will pedal across the Golden Gate bridge, dip her front tire in the Pacific Ocean and tie a ribbon around 4000 miles and 70 days of constant pedaling. In her honor I wanted to write a little piece of music, something that called to mind a bicycle both in its sound and in its structure.
To achieve this effect I decided to build a system in Max that would let me build a piece based around short, looping samples that can move in and out of phase. If you've ever seen (or heard) Steve Reich's Drumming then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
Reich's piece consists of several drummers playing similar sequences of notes, where each sequence gradually shifts with respect to the other. The effect is of a constantly shifting rhythmical pattern that varies from rigidly in time to syncopated to polyrhythmic to hopelessly chaotic over the course of several minutes. For my piece I also wanted to use short sequences of notes, but I also wanted to control those sequences of notes with sequences of parameters.
Specifically, I might have a note sequence that goes A-B-D-G. I might also have a sequence of control parameters, something like Loud-Soft-Loud. If I play the two in time then the two sequences can combine to produce a third sequence. If a boldfaced note is loud, then that third sequence looks like this:
A-B-D-G-A-B-D-G-A-B...
The whole piece is based around exactly that kind of recombination and phasing, both of melodic elements and of the parameters that control them. You can listen to the end result on my Soundcloud.
No comments:
Post a Comment