increpare games

This is a sequel to this post on Lerdahl’s GTTM.

Okay…apologies for the delay…I was busy, but also was uncretain whether I understood the material myself, that stopped me from saying more. Additional disclaimer: I’ve tried my best to pull out all the melody and counterpoint related content of the theory to leave things chordal. I’ve savaged the original theory in the process. Apologies to all affected by my act of gross violence.

Prolongation Trees

Okay, so what is a prolongation tree? They look like this:

Continue reading ›

I’ll be posting some articles about the theory of Lerdahl very very soon. In anticipation of them (and to put something up so I can submit it to the Haskell Activity Report), here’s my implementation of a toy-model based roughly around his theory. It’s restricted to the process of chord generation.

Here‘s a simple playing by me of a chord-sequence that it produced. Here‘s a midi example that it produced by itself when I had it more developed.

There’s still a reasonable amount of work to be done on it, but it’s at a stage where it’s presentable.

Anyway, the current version of the haskell source code is here. Hopefully I’ll have more developed versions up in the future.

Two short pieces here I finished about a month and a month-and-a-half ago respectively; one I think a not unsuccessful attempt at, admittedly, a genre without incredibly high standards of acceptance, that of the waltz-set:

5 Waltzes ( ps | pdf )

Anyway, the point was to try and be a little bit lyrical, and I don’t think I fell flat on my face (saying that they’re not particularly inspired lines).

And the second piece, which I have, I think, almost no time for excepting an odd rhythmical artefact that people might notice in bar 9 that doesn’t occur in bar 11, even though they are precisely the same. Unless my playing’s deteriorated to the extent that I have developed some accenting pathology. I should be able to have more fun with this effect in future (I’m not saying that it hasn’t been done before; it is, however, something that as an effect is new to me).

Lullaby ( ps | pdf )

Oh yes, now, without committing to anything, I wish to explain that though these pieces are rather a further step down the path of the trivialisation and miniaturisation I have tried rather hard to avoid, I had not put much time in to writing music when I wrote them and, as such, these are my just desserts, but that they do not in any event signify where I am going, nor where I wish to go, merely that I am, in fact, at least so obliging to myself so as to trundle along doing something where I can.

And, for those of the world with an interest in what I’ve been doing musically in the month or so since I wrote these things; I have put together several rather more substantial (but still, alas, miniature) pieces. They’ll find their way here in their own good time. Trying to become more harmonic. Succeeding, I think, but I’m going to have soon to make some concerted efforts to introduce some rhythm and polyphony else ways I’ll end up writing pseudo-chorales for the rest of my days, and then where would I be?

Also, prepare yourself for a JOKE, tomorrow, courtesy of a clarinettist.

Woh, like. Totally going in a dodge direction at the moment. No more, though.

So first three light pieces. The first I threw together today and am more or less ok with, insubstantial as it is, the other two are my first efforts from last October when I was making the transition from thinking about modulations to trying to write music. I had a bunch of other modulatory snippits that were short, but occasionally quite nice; alas I don’t really have the skills to extract cohesive musical works from them at the moment.

Ok, so, then:

Piece 1 ( ps | pdf )
Piece 2 ( ps | pdf )
Piece 3 ( ps | pdf )

And, only slightly more substantially, a sonatina; weak, and almost certainly a dead and, indeed, rather clichéd end, but I do like some of the sounds it in.

Sonatina ( ps | pdf )

So I had a bit of a break there for a few weeks from musical things. I found it rather hard to do anything upon my return, so forced myself through seven short exercise pieces (linked to below), where in the more developed ones I was trying to figure out how to write free counterpoint properly (no, I haven’t quite cracked that yet). Anyway, I think I’m ready to try writing music again now.

Seven Preludes ( PS | PDF )