Re: "Generative music" and "Algorithmic composition"

[Philip Rhoades]

Paul,


On 2014-01-16 01:58, Paul Morris wrote:
> Philip Rhoades wrote
> > It occurred to me that the next step would be to generate something 
> > that
> > is a little more melodic or musical
>
> One simple thing you can do is to only work with the notes from one key 
> at a
> time.  And I think this makes sense in terms of learning as well as 
> sounding
> more musical.  (Unless you aspire to play only atonal music...)
>
> The following modifies David's snippet so it only selects notes from 
> the key
> of C major (and extends the range to two octaves), then you can use
> \transpose to change to a different key when you are ready to move on 
> to
> another key.
>
> \version "2.18.0"
>
> randomNotes =
> {
>   $@(let ((notes (ly:music-property #{ <e f g a b c' d' e' f' g' a' b' 
> c'
> d'> #}
>                                     'elements)))
>       (map (lambda (x) (list-ref notes (random (length notes)))) (iota
> 400)))
> }
>
> \new Voice {
>   \transpose c c {
>     \randomNotes
>   }
> }


What I was thinking of was something a little more sophisticated than 
the Ruby script I wrote which simply selected a note within [+/-]1 of 
the value of the current note, and on occasions, selected a note within 
[+/-]2 of the value of the current note, and rarely jumped to a 
completely random note.  This gave some mildly interesting runs of notes 
and sounded vaguely melodic or musical.  I had thought that there might 
be a number of people here with much more sophisticated algorithms 
written in Scheme . . it seems Scheme has been used for this sort of 
thing quite a bit.  I have just spent a fair bit of time looking for 
stuff outside Lilypond but still written in Scheme but couldn't find 
anything of immediate interest.  I guess I was just thinking of the next 
step past the basics . .


> FWIW, I think using something like this to practice guitar (especially 
> at a
> beginner level) would be more effective if you didn't play it straight
> through, but repeated each measure several times (maybe 8?) before 
> moving on
> to the next one.  That repetition will be more helpful for learning 
> than
> constantly giving your fingers/mind something new to figure out.  As 
> you
> progress you can reduce the number of repetitions until you're playing 
> it
> straight through.


The exercises that I am redoing with David's script are string by 
string, and then two strings at a time, then three etc etc but it does 
get a bit uninteresting - that's why I thought something that sounded a 
little better, because there was actually some theory behind it, would 
be nice . .

Regards.

Phil.
--
Philip Rhoades

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