Imaginary Landscapes is a profile of visionary composer, artist and producer Brian Eno. It brings into focus Eno’s seemingly disparate work in sound, vision and light, and explores his music in visual terms, based on landscapes and images that have shaped his life as an artist.

Despite its popularity, though, the music of C64 games has rarely been analysed in academic articles.
Karen Collins’ Loops And Bloops: Music of the Commodore 64 Games discusses the technical constraints of C64’s SID soundchip and how this shaped the musical aesthetic of music on the Commodore 64:

Technological constraints are nothing new to musical composition, although most discussions arising about the subject have centered on twentieth century concerns.

Mark Katz discusses how the 78 RPM record led to a standard time limit for pop songs, and how Stravinsky famously tailor-made Sérénade en LA for the length of an LP; although he points out, however, that Stravinsky may have been shaped by “his penchant for self-imposed limitations” (Katz, 2004: 3-5).

Critiques of “hard” technological determinism as it relates to musical technologies have dominated the discussion (e.g. Taylor, 1993: 27; Théberge, 1997: 160; Katz, 2004), in favour of a softer approach in which the relationship is more of a negotiation. As with other recent approaches to music technology, I would argue that the relationship between technology and aesthetics is one of symbiosis rather than dominance, what Barry Salt (1985: 37) refers to as a “loose pressure on what is done, rather than a rigid constraint.”

Micromusicians tend to agree, and embrace the constraints as an important part of the creative process, as Teamtendo intimates: “Working with this limited harmonic vocabulary forces you to be creative, and there are some very pleasant discoveries along the way,” or, says Goto80, “it’s fun working with such hardcore limits, forcing you to realize your ideas in other ways.”

In order to explore the constraints of the C64 on composition, I first discuss the limitations of the sound chip, showing the conventional ways in which the chip was used. I follow this with a comparison of well-known, pre-composed songs which were covered on the C64 in various games. I then explore approaches to interactivity and looping in Commodore games music, drawing comparisons between the C64 and its contemporaries.

Full article here.

iPhone Music Software: This is a demo video of Octavian (App Store link), a $2.99 iPhone Keyboard Calculator.

With Octavian, you can:

• Quickly find scales and chords and transpose them to any root note
• View any mode of any scale
• View chords in root position and first, second, and third inversions
• Build chords on any scale degree
• Use Scale Explore to view all scales that contain the notes of the current chord
• Use Chord Explore to identify chords built on the degrees of a scale
• Traverse the Circle of Fifths by holding down the note selector for 1.5 seconds
• View scales/chords as notes (C E G), intervals from the root (0 4 7), or intervals from the previous note (0 4 3).

NOTE Octavian is NOT a synth. It makes no sound. Bitnotic hopes to make Octavian THE music theory app for the iPhone.

Brian Eno had some interesting comments on genius vs “scenius” at the Sydney Luminous Festival:

I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.

As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.

What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.

he period that I was particularly interested in, ’round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.

So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.

Certainly there was a “scenius”for electronic music in the 1970’s, when Eno did some of his most important work. We may have a scenius now, too, spurred on by the surge in creativity that Internet media is driving.

What do you think is more important – the contributions of individuals like Eno, or the time and the scene that they work in?

via MoreDarkThanShark

In this documentary, David Toop discusses his thoughts on sound and their role in music. Toop speaks about his  fascination with sound and how digital technology affects its creation and reception. He also explains the genesis of the ‘laptop orchestra’ as we see it in action during a recent workshop for new members.

Give it some time – Toop has some compelling thoughts on sound and music theory.

About David Toop

David Toop is a musician/composer, writer, and curator. He has written four books, currently translated into eight languages: Rap Attack (now in its third edition), Ocean of Sound (included in the Observer Music Monthly’s 50 Greatest Music Books Ever), Exotica (a winner of the 21st annual American Books Awards for 2000), and Haunted Weather. His first album, New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, was released on Brian Eno’s Obscure label in 1975; since 1995 he has released seven solo albums.

Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts London, and Senior Research Fellow at the Sound Arts & Design Department of the London College of Communication, he completed an AHRC Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts in 2007. His project – Sound Body – was a three year study of digital technology and improvised music performance.

He also directs Unknown Devices: the Laptop Orchestra, a large improvising ensemble convened at London College of Communication.

David Toop – Making Sounds

Produced by Hannah Charlton & Matt Rooney
Directed by Barry Lewis & Emil Charlaff

Special thanks to:
London College of Communication
The Flying Lizards
The Unknown Devices Orchestra

Original compositions by David Toop

via RareFrequency

This synthesis tutorial, Alesis Andromeda Atonal Synthesis, is pretty strange, but it’s full of great sounds and interesting information.

via JeffreyPlaide:

This instructional video explores atonal synthesis using the amazing Alesis Andromeda analogue synthesizer.

We can investigate atonal applications for sound synthesis and with some background theory, understand how to create ambient pads and ringing atmospherics and similar sonic combinations. Analogue synthesis can create atonal and ringing timbres that can be played to bring about dissonance and clangourous combinations that can be used to create atonal musical sequences and special effects including background atmospherics and pads.

Matti Niinimäki created this video, which visualizes William S. Burrough’s thoughts on the origin and theory of Tape Cut-Ups.

via RichardMetzger

Don’t watch this if you’re easily depressed!

Charts Music, by Johannes Kreidler. The melodies are derived from stock charts, and then arranged with Microsoft’s Composition Software Songsmith.

Kreidler is a provocateur and uses music to raise ethical questions. He’s best known for using his piece, product placements, to create a nightmare for GEMA (the German RIAA, and explore the ways that copyrights limit art in the process.

zplane.development has released version 1.5 of vielklang, its audio harmonization instrument. The utilization of voice leading and harmony progression models allows vielklang to create harmony parts in a more musical way than traditional harmony processors and makes it a versatile and creative tool for musicians, songwriters and producers.

The new version adds the following features:

• live MIDI input: play chords or voicings directly on the keyboard to control vielklang’s harmonization
• new harmonization styles: 3-voice intelligent, Block Chords, Fauxbourdon, Organum
• new export options: Audio/MIDI File Export for individual voices, MIDI export of harmony tracks
• improved input melody analysis: new note detection algorithm improves accuracy and robustness
• Ready for Pro Tools 8 and Cubase 4.5

vielklang allows quick and easy creation of natural sounding backing vocals, brass sections, and other harmony parts with up to four voices. It offers a new musical approach for the generation of the voicings: rather than synthesizing plain parallel voicings, vielklang takes into account the melodic context to create a chord-based arrangement and is thus able to produce musical harmonizations instantly.

Automatic recognition engines take care of initialization of obvious parameters like root note and key to let the user to focus on musical issues rather than tedious plugin configuration.

Experienced users have the option to edit the result with parameters like range (ambitus) or the distribution of the voices, to modify root note and scale, to edit single harmonies and to change each single pitch of each individual voice. Alternatively, the harmonization can be controlled by direct MIDI keyboard input.

vielklang’s main features are:

• musical harmonization using voice-leading and harmony progression models
• adjustable pitch correction, delay, timing humanization, timbre, volume, and pan for each voice
• Audio-to-MIDI
• MIDI-controlled snapshot system allows several harmonizations per audio input
• one-click modification of tempo, pitch, scale and harmonies
• plug and play: don’t waste time with tedious configuration

vielklang 1.1 is available for RTAS (Mac OS X, Windows), VST (Mac OS X, Windows) and Audio Units (Mac OS X) at a MSRP of $299.00/249.00.

British composer, artist and activist Brian Eno was a founding member of the rock group Roxy Music, has produced recordings by Talking Heads and U2 and created the genre of ambient music. Eno’s latest album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, is a collaboration with David Byrne.

He recently talked with NPR, as part of their This I Believe series, about the importance of singing:

Singing: The Key To A Long Life

by Brian Eno

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

A few years ago a friend and I realized that we both loved singing but didn’t do much of it. So we started a weekly a capella group with just four members. After a year we started inviting other people to join. We didn’t insist on musical experience — in fact some of our members had never sung before. Now the group has ballooned to around 15 or 20 people.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor. A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing.

Well, there are physiological benefits, obviously: You use your lungs in a way that you probably don’t for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly. And there are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness becausea capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Well here’s what we do in an evening: We get some drinks, some snacks, some sheets of lyrics and a strict starting time. We warm up a bit first.

The critical thing turns out to be the choice of songs. The songs that seem to work best are those based around the basic chords of blues and rock and country music. You want songs that are word-rich, but also vowel-rich because it’s on the long vowels sounds of a song such as “Bring It On Home To Me” (”You know I’ll alwaaaaays be your slaaaaave”), that’s where your harmonies really express themselves. And when you get a lot of people singing harmony on a long note like that, it’s beautiful.

But singing isn’t only about harmonizing pitch like that. It has two other dimensions. The first one is rhythm. It’s thrilling when you get the rhythm of something right and you all do a complicated rhythm together: “Oh, when them cotton balls get a-rotten, you can’t pick very much cotton.” So when 16 or 20 people get that dead right together at a fast tempo that’s very impressive. But the other thing that you have to harmonize besides pitch and rhythm is tone. To be able to hit exactly the same vowel sound at a number of different pitches seems unsurprising in concept, but is beautiful when it happens.

So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.

Here’s the link to listen to Eno’s This I Believe essay.

Matriosity is a free Mac application designed to help with serial matrix creation – in case you want to get your Schoenberg on, atonal style. 

It lets you enter in a prime row, either as numbers (1-11, and either 0 or 12 for C) or letters (C, C#, etc.). It then generates a serial matrix, displaying the data as per the users’ preference as numbers or letters, and displaying the prime form of the matrix’s dyads, trichords, tetrachords, and hexachords. Matrices created by Matriosity can be saved for later and printed. Version 1.2 supports matrices of different sizes and repeated pitches.

Matriosity also provides audio previews (though it takes a bit of serial geekery).

In a nutshell, the software harmonizes melodies in the style of U2, Radiohead or other existing source material.

The system is described in Ching-Hua Chuan’s paper on Automatic Style-Specific Accompaniment:

The system aims to assist music lovers in writing a complete song with sophisticated chord progressions. The system takes melody as input, and harmonizes it with style-specific accompaniments. The system is hybrid: statistical learning such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) maintains the style by learning from only a few pieces from users’ favoriate bands/song writers, while music knowledge such as Neo-Riemannian Transform ensures the generated chords are resolved musically correctly.

Two experiments are conducted for this project. In the first experiment, the system harmonizes the melody of the song Across the Universe from Beatles using three different rock bands’ styles: Radiohead, U2, and Green Day. The second experiment is a Turing test: the system generates a new accompaniment for a melody of Radiohead’s song based on the other songs of the band.

Here’s Science Daily’s take on how it works:

The takeoff point of the Chew-Chuan analysis is one on which much recent music theoretic work is based — the work of 19th century German theorist Hugo Riemann, who rethought the old ideas of harmony, creating new ways of representing rules that make some, but not all, rhythmic successions of overlaid notes sound musical. Riemann’s representation has only recently been applied to rock music.

The ASSA analysis looks at the tree of possible accompanying chord sequences, and analyzes which branches are followed, treating the unfolding string of possibilities as a Markov series – that is, a temporally ordered series of states (in this case, chords) in which chord determines its successor.

The resulting system thus has two elements. One is analysis of complete, accompanied music samples for what (neo-Riemannian) harmonic progressions they tend to follow. The second is taking these derived stylistic rules and using them to generate accompaniment — using a Markov series — for a user-provided melody.

There are demos available at Chuan page for the paper.  The demos sound pretty wooden – but the process of understanding the underlying rules of a musicians style – and why knowing the rules isn’t enough to reproduce it – expands our understanding of how musical styles work.

Mekentosj BV has announced the availability of Pianochords, an application for iPhone and iPod touch that allows you to “easily look up all those nasty keyboard and piano chords”.

Apparently, it’s designed for those times when you’re feeling too lazy to figure out what a C-Major chord is all yourself. 

Actually, some may find the app useful – it can do a lot more than help you look up Major chords:

Pianochords Features:

• Capable of showing 50 derived chords for all 12 keys
• Shift chords up and down to see all variants
• Toggle between single key and chord mode
• Uses openAL to play selected chords using high-quality piano samples
• Great looking and super intuitive user interface

Minimum Requirements:

Pianochords works on all iPhone and iPod touch models.

Pricing and Availability:

Pianochords is available in the iPhone App Store for $1.99 USD.

Mathtrek has an interesting post that explores the geometry of music.

According to Dmitri Tymoczko, a composer and music theorist at Princeton University…to grasp the true structure of music, we need to understand the geometry of hyperdimensional objects.

Tymoczko compares the structure of music to the shape of a rock face that a rock-climber is scrambling up. “If you know the conditions of the rock face, you can predict the motions of the climber,” he says. “The structure of the space makes certain choices overwhelmingly natural or convenient. There’s something similar that goes on with music. When you think about things abstractly, you can come to understand that the directions that music went aren’t completely arbitrary. Composers are exploring the possibilities that musical space presents them with.”

Tymoczko built on familiar geometrical analogs for music. For example, musical pitch is often imagined as lying on a line with low notes to the left and high notes to the right. Furthermore, as pitches go higher and higher, the notes repeat in different octaves, such that a low C, a middle C, and a high C all sound very similar. Often, the exact octave of a particular note doesn’t matter very much in music. Instead, musicians commonly visualize a “pitch class circle,” which comes from the original line by gluing together each point of the line that represents the same note in different octaves. So low C, middle C, and high C, for example, would all be glued together.

Applying the same kind of reasoning to complete pieces of music, Tymoczko created a geometric space in which he could analyze a piece of music with two notes being played simultaneously. He started with a piece of paper and made the horizontal direction represent the pitch of one note and the vertical direction represent the pitch of the other. A piece of music with two voices would correspond to dots moving around in this space.

Then he modified the space to embed musical structure within it. First, Tymoczko used the same method musicians used to create the pitch circle. He glued the left edge of the page to the right edge, turning the horizontal lines into circles and creating a cylinder from the whole page. Then he glued the bottom end of the cylinder to the top, turning the vertical lines into circles as well and creating a donut shape from the entire page.

Next, he noted that the order of the notes in a chord doesn’t much matter. That means that the point on his page that has C in the horizontal direction and E in the vertical direction is really the same as the point that has E in the horizontal direction and C in the vertical direction. So he took his space and glued all those points together. It takes a bit of effort to visualize it, but for two simultaneous notes, this turns the donut shape into a Möbius strip.

Music theorists have long found Chopin’s E minor prelude puzzling. , Although the chord progressions sound smooth to the ear, they don’t quite follow the traditional rules of harmony. When Tymoczko looked at the piece and watched the composition’s motion through his geometrical space, he saw that Chopin was moving in a systematic way among the different layers of the four-dimensional cubes. “It’s almost as if he’s an improviser with a set of rules and set of constraints,” Tymoczko says.

Another way of visualizing Chopin’s composition is through a three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional space, as in the video above. The chords primarily cluster in the center of the space, usually moving through small distances.

I’m not sure if I”M convinced by some of Tymoczko’s assertions – but his work offers an interesting way of visualizing relationships in music.

The Improvisator is a new Windows plugin that knows the mathematical logic and rules of harmonic theory. It’s designed to directly offer technically correct harmonic options.

The Harmony Improvisator is described as a completely new composition tool that makes the world of harmonic functions transparent to its users.

It supports the musician in composing, improvising and creatively exploring harmony.

Here’s a video of the Improvisator in action:

The Harmony Improvisator VST Plugin provides:

• Harmonic improvisation.
• Composing with the rules of classic harmonic theory
• Complex cadences suitable for all styles of music.
• Improvisation mode for active live performance.
• Visualization of chords depending on their musical function and on a virtual keyboard.
• Compatibility with most VST hosting sequencers. (Cubase SX3, Cubase S4, Live 7, Fruity Loops 7)
• Critical saving of time when creating harmonic frames for songs, soundtracks and arrangements.

The mathematic logic of harmonic theory, which has evolved in the art of composition over centuries, is rarely emphasized in today’s music software. Even the technique of many professional composers consists of investing a remarkable amount of time trying out different chords. Improvisator shortens this phase of work and provides you the desired result quickly and accurately.

• Improvisator comes with a rich database of chords – the systematic naming of which relates to their function in a musical context. This offers practical access to every user from beginning musicians to professional composers.
• Improvisator automatically follows voicing rules (avoiding forbidden parallels, etc).
• Improvisator independently calculates and provides harmonically reasonable and clever suggestions on how to proceed a train of harmonic functions. The user’s creativity is stimulated and space for harmonic experimentation is opened.
• Provides practical support for free melody improvisation on a harmonic framework by splitting a midi keyboard and allowing transposition of the right hand to the actual key while the left hand can manually break the harmonies. A public database on www.Improvisator.de offers the opportunity to get new harmonic ideas from other musicians and to discuss harmonic progressions.
• Free updates until version 1.9.

Improvisator retails for 79 Euro.