Toward a New Sound for Games
Spectro-Morphology
Music is an aural art. While many different compositional systems are possible, ignoring the listener is detrimental to any compositional process. This fact is at the root of arguments regarding the "cognitive opacity" of post-tonal music, because music is most naturally judged by what is heard, and what is heard is not always what the composer intends. If a listener cannot perceive a compositional structure in as great of detail as other musical elements, it does not mean that these structures are not worthwhile. [Read More]Come To Daddy Analysis
The 1997 release of the music video for Aphex Twin's Come to Daddy, Pappy mix had the effect of catapulting the director, Chris Cunningham, from relative obscurity into being a highly sought-after video director. While the video got somewhat minimal airplay in America, MTV executive James Hyman is quoted on Wikipedia as saying that it is "one of the most powerful, certainly the most disturbing I've ever seen" (Wikipedia). What made this video so powerful that it immediately grabbed the attention of artists like Madonna and Björk, both known for having many excellent music videos? [Read More]Early Electronic Music
The early development of electronic / electroacoustic music had as much to do with research and philosophy as it did with composing. The proponents of this genre concentrated a great deal of effort toward understanding the physical properties of sound, and the characteristics of aural perception. They developed and published many theories and principles, and this research-based aspect played a significant compositional role that was largely unprecedented. Pierre Schaeffer, the 'father' of the genre, claimed that he was disappointed with his inability to really succeed at making good music (Holmes 2002), but he set forth a number of important principles to be used for the meaningful creation of electroacoustic music, thus starting a trend of ideological development influencing the composition of musical works. [Read More]We Shall Overcome
I was recently working on an arrangement of We Shall Overcome, a well-known and historically significant anthem of the American civil rights movement. When arranging a piece, I generally like to base my work off of as many recordings as I'm able to get my hands on, and I also check around online and in fake books to see what chords are suggested in other arrangements. In this case, the chord progressions that I was able to find online were completely different from any recording that I could find. The fake books weren't much better. Any musician knows not to completely trust a fake book, but it seems to me that there should be an accurate transcription of this song, so I've posted mine here. [Read More]Capitalism and American Electronic Music
Some people think a composer's supposed to please them, but in a way a composer is a chronicler... He's supposed to report on what he's seen and lived.-Charles Mingus
American electronic music in the '60s and '70s evolved to be distinct from Western European electronic music because of the unique cultural and economic climate in America. In America, "popular" music reigns supreme, and this is in large part due to our political policies of "supply-side economics, small government, and free trade" (Osborne 2004). Music that doesn't find sustainable marketability is music that stands little chance of being distributed on a national level. [Read More]
Music Melody Matching Machine
I describe a simple computer-based melody matching system, based on comparing short monophonic audio recordings of pieces of tonal music. The process starts with the user singing a piece that they would like to identify into a microphone. The system then attempts to transcribe the recording from its audio representation into a string of quantized MIDI notes. For simplicity, the matching algorithm has been limited to just pitch data, but a more complete system would employ rhythmic and dynamic data as well to more accurately match pieces of music. [Read More]Key Finding in a Query by Humming System
I describe an extension to the melody matching system used in Gersic [7]. The system takes user input in the form of a sung or hummed query recorded through a microphone. Once recorded, the query is transcribed into a string of quantized MIDI notes which are matched to a series of similarly transcribed audio files. The matching process is executed by means of a local-alignment edit distance algorithm. The extension described here leaves the system intact, but adds a diatonic key-finding system between the transcription and matching processes. Once the diatonic key of a query has been discerned, this information can be used to reduce transcription or singing errors. [Read More]How to Use Email::MIME::Creator
While attempting to automatically generate a somewhat complex multipart email in Perl, I came to the realization that the Email::MIME group of Perl modules is very nice and very powerful, but it's really poorly documented. It's not all that hard to use, but it's nearly impossible to figure out, especially if you don't have much experience with formatting multipart MIME emails. [Read More]Howard Fredrics - The Raven's Kiss
The Raven's Kiss, by Howard Fredrics is a relatively contemporary work of electroacoustic music, written in 1993. The piece is stunning to listen to, and the underlying concepts of the piece are strong. They are more artistically motivated than technologically motivated. The use of technology in this piece is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. We hear a variety of different processing techniques, from standard delay and reverb effects to channel vocoding, but the technical processing methods at work are not where the interest of this piece lies, and the listener is not really asked to find interest in these processes. This piece is held together by the aural environment created through intertwining the music with the text. [Read More]
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