#114

thx,
I agree…

#115

I probably posted this in another thread at some point, but this is a demo of a friend of mine’s “Stringvencer”, which is basically an elastic ‘timeline’. He shoots out and in to Ableton using this as part of his workflow.

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#116

hummm yessss… I’m hacking (right now) on a new version of my midilooper (based round a monome grid & mpd32 this time, ditching the quneo) & reconsidering the design decision in original software for 96ppqn ‘master’ timebase. The trick I played with version 1 was to ‘upsample’ incoming 24ppqn midi clock by timing the incoming ticks & filling in the gaps (or simply generate 96ppqn directly if master)…

Kind of thinking now, maybe 96 is just overkill. For 120bpm that translates to 5ms…

Anyone care to share any of their private hunches or more systematic knowledge on the importance/sensitivity of microtiming for ‘unquantised’ sequencing?

#117

Leviev draws from a huge well of folk or gypsy tradition in Bulgaria and the Balkans, where odd time signatures are fairly common. Here’s the man performing the piece himself on piano.

and one of his earlier compositions

an hour of much more folk/roma music here, odd sigs and everything.

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#118

Awesome! Thank you. Everything really is on YouTube.

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#119

Yes, that higher structure stuff gets called hypermeter.

I really like this from James Tenney back in the early 70s, which is making a slightly different point, but still worth a read:

I think of form as the same thing, on a larger temporal scale, as what’s called content on a smaller scale. That old form/content dichotomy is, to me, a spurious one, because they involve the same thing at different hierarchical levels of perception. What we take to be the substance or content of some sound — say, a string quartet — is really the result of forms — formal shapes and structures at a microscopic, or “microphonic” level: particular envelopes, wave-forms, and sequences of these — details in the signal. All form is just the same thing at a larger level, involving spans of time over, say, five or ten or twenty minutes or more. It’s precisely the same thing physically. When you begin to see it that way, you can begin to feel it musically. So my interest in form is identical to my interest in sound (laughs).

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Quotes on Music & Composition
#120

I think this fits well into this discussion

Kinda like the beginning of idm, in a way

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#121

I’m going to throw the concept of the clave into the mix. Clave (or key) has it’s roots in african music, but is most well known in latin american music in the son clave or rhumba clave. These are repeating subdivisions of a duple or triple based meter (generally 2 bars of 2/4 or 6/8) that form the rhythmic foundation of popular cuban dance rhythms like the mambo, rhumba, son, songo, timba, etc. The clave serves as a framework for the rest of the instruments to hang from and syncopate rhythmically.

It can also serve as a pivot for subdivision modulation between duple or triple, as demonstrated here by Horatio Hernandez:

And if that’s too didactic for you, check this video of him solo on the kit, maintaining the rhumba clave on his left foot almost continuously through various subdivisions, permutations, and choppy nuttiness on top. Left foot clave starts around a minute in and warning, the is at a drummers festival so it gets pretty showy:

I find as I grow older that I’m less interested in chop-heavy, count the numbers heavy prog or math music (as has been mentioned by earlier posters). The most interesting odd signature (or perhaps non-duple) music is that which has an inherent groove that you can feel and potentially dance to (or at least allows you to entrain, even if bodily motion ain’t your thing).

A clave can serve to anchor the groove and your orientation within the meter. To wit, check out this Mehldau trio recording of All the Things You Are in 7/8:

the clave here is 4+4+3+3, and you can hear it anchoring all of the phrasing, solos, etc. throughout the tune.

Once you practice a particular meter/clave enough, you can begin to feel that underlying rhythm, stop counting, and start really playing in the meter, be it 4/4 or 11/16.

And for some gratuitous and showy both extreme mathy-ness and feel in one song, the Bad Plus is a bit of a guilty pleasure:

6 Likes
#122

Yes! This is where it’s at.

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#123

not really stemming the tide of jazz appreciation in this thread partly because it is revealing in and of itself

In shooting Timeless we would always look for those moments when music would just leak into the room. When the excitement for a piece or a passage leads musicians into an improvised moment. This is one of those moments.
There are very few musicians as incredible or exciting to watch as Karriem Riggins and Steve “Thundercat” Bruner… at soundcheck Thundercat took out his iphone and played Karriem Protocosmos by Tony Williams. They both knew the song and with little else said they were off… the excitement is palpable.

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#124

Suprised that no-one seems to have mentioned Conlon Nancarrow here. Of course it’s not electronic but the processes he uses have a lot to do with the discussion.

Conlon Nancarrow, Study for Player Piano No. 21 (Canon X)

blows Aphex Twin out of the water if you ask me.

responding to other threads here, I think that DAW’s rely too much on meter and division and don’t give the possibility to use additive rhythm. There have been posts about balkan dance music and indian music. I think additive rhythm could be the key to doing something different with electronics, but you’d have to program it yourself. There are some eurorack modules that can add and subtract clocks as well as the usual dividing or multiplying.

Here’s another piano piece using additive rhythm. Youtube clip even has the notation. Note that there are no metric markings at the beginning, but bar divisions to show where each cell of music starts and stops…

Messiaen - ‪Cantéyodjayâ‬

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHqvZk4mQs4

x gus

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#125

so as I understand it @mzero’s haskell sequencer has this neat gesture to ‘compose’ loops additively from 1-bar phrases…

I’m trying to find a way to combine some variant on that gesture with any-length-any-subdivision ‘sequences’ in my sequencer project. So for adding n sequences into one sequence it might go:

  • press ‘appending-add’
  • then press the destination sequence
  • press the N sequences to add
  • press ‘appending-add’ again to finalise…
    (this needs a bit more thought, but anyway you get the idea)

This gets kind of tricky when you want to subdivide the quarter note in 5 with incoming 24ppqn clock. All is well as long as the loop length is an integer number of clock ticks - just build a lookup table to figure out the closest approach to those quintuplets…

However once you allow the user to specify, for example, a loop of length 11 quintuplets on a 24ppqn grid, then additively composing that (or even just looping it) requires fractional grid-indexing. I’ve given up figuring this out for now, and will impose clock-snapping (with optional beat-snapping) until release 0.1 of the software.

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#126


still code, different era>

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#127

Nancarrow does seem somewhat overlooked. This event in Berkeley a few years ago -

http://archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/press/release/TXT0320

was truly wonderful.

#128

Wow, I wish i could have been there. On the other hand 3 days of those rhythms would probably have done my head in!

#129

maybe I’m misunderstanding you but how about an inner and an outer loop? working on a new version of prgm that uses regions as an outer loop where the patterns can loop freely inside.

1 Like
#130

I’m not sure I’m following exactly, but have you looked into using Bjorklund’s algorithm:

http://ics-web.sns.ornl.gov/timing/Ugliness%20Tech%20Note.pdf

Here’s the paper that I originally read the speaks of using it in a musical context for rhythmic generation:

http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf

Or maybe I’m just not understanding the problem.

#131

As we are on drum machines at the fringe of electronic music, I like what Robbie Avenaim does with his Semi Automated Percussion System:

or:

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#132

No - I cheated and built an enormous lookup table, for any clock-speed from 0 to 96 & any beat division from 0 to 9! My code for that is super-mega-fugly I had a strong suspicion there had to be a better way, so thanks for the link to those two papers…

umm - well there is an additional complexity…

When you have Bjorklund’s algorithm (or giant lookup table) on hand, there’s still an issue looping sequences of length 11 quintuplets. For a quintuplet loop, the position of read-pointer (in clock-ticks relative to the start of loop) should be:

n-ticks_loop_frame_of_reference = n-ticks_global % (11 / 5 * master_clock_resolution)

so you have to modulo by a fractional number. There’s fundamentally no issue with doing that, but now the rest of the code must behave correctly when the ticks-index of a loop (which a fundamental state variable) is fractional. Think I’m handling this by using (round n-ticks_loop_frame_of_reference) to index things, but suspect that method may actually drop the odd beat. Also, now concatenating sequences becomes a right pain, because the sequences aren’t always an integer-number of clock-ticks long…

Anyway - there are bigger fish to fry on this project than this corner case, but I certainly want to handle it correctly in the end!

#133

Sequence organisation is inspired heavily by boomerang pedal’s sync modes. To explain boomerang loop operation, you record a ‘time-master’ loop, then every subsequent loop syncs to an integer multiple of the master. the three non-master loops either play in serial or parallel, depending on a mode setting, but always synchronised to and parallel with the master loop.

Each of my ‘serial sections’ has 1 grid-sequence & 3 free-sequences. There will be a global mode switch that states the rule for the length of a section. The 3 useful rules I can think of are:

  • section ends as soon as the longest sequence ends
  • section plays until all currently-playing sequences end simultaneously
  • section ends the next time any currently-playing sequence ends