notesdontmatter

Creative Computing – Week 12 – “Integrated example”

For this semester’s major project I have decided to apply my programming skills to creating a Max patch that generates and manipulates serial music. The strictly serial component will be constrained to note pitches, for to apply an entire tone row’s variables (pitch, dynamics, duration etc) in the true serial technique of Schoenberg would require a ridiculous amount of programming, and the end result would be unpredictable and I imagine invariably unremarkable. The idea of having the program generate the tones through a VST instrument of some kind whilst the user gets creative with the other attributes via the interface sounds much more appealing.


I plan to have the Velocity, Duration and MIDI Control attributes controlled / automated to some extent via the use of a Markov order chain. The pending complexity of this is likely to restrict its depth to second order only. Nevertheless, with all automated or ‘generative’ functionality I would like to have the program react in some way to its own history of executed tasks.


This is part of my potential interface, and below are some examples of the difficulty presented by my choice to write the program in such a way that it denies the user the ability to select anything other than a genuinely serial tone row. All twelve tones of the chromatic scale must be used, once a note is picked using one slider the program automatically blocks the other selection sliders from using that note in any octave range (or at least it will once it is programmed in a way that works efficiently. As you can see from the images the program is fast becoming much too complicated and unrealistically difficult for a computer to run, and this is before it’s even played a note!!


Much of this will need to be reworked, but it gives a general idea of where I’m at.


Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Creative Computing – Week 12 – Integrated example.” Tutorial Presented at Tute room 408, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 31st May, 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 2:11 PM