| Michael Mossey | Music | Csound |
This is a three-voice non-traditional fugue which doesn't use tonality. The subject and answer appear a tritone apart. In this recording, it is performed by Richard St. Clair, a composer I met on the Internet. He is virtually sight-reading the piece here, and he plays it beautifully!
This is a Csound rendering (see thoughts about Csound) using a simple trombone Csound model. It is an atonal piece, and it doesn't have any formal structure to it.
This is a brief and simple composition that demonstrates a keyboard-like Csound instrument. I've always thought that the Karplus-Strong algorithm for a plucked string was very musical, and this instrument is similar. When I say an instrument is musical, I mean that playing notes with it produces a lot of the feelings I value best about music, such as emotional warmth, delicacy, and heartfelt expressiveness. This instrument works like this: pink noise plays into a comb filter until it comes to steady state, and then a burst of this filtered noise is applied to a second comb filter. I'm using comb filters instead of the waveguide opcode in order to avoid tuning problems with the latter, and omitting the lowpass filter in this way has a minimal impact on the naturalness of the sound. Here's the orchestra file and the score file
Here are some experiments in making music out of a sequence of chords, which are all chosen from the same pitch class set. Here I'm using [0135], a pretty set. Each new chord is made from a different transposition/inversion of [0135]. Out of the 24 possible transpositions/inversions available for the next chord, how do I choose? One interesting method is to choose a transposition/inversion that has some pitch classes in common with the prior chord.
I call two sets which have pitches in common "linked sets." These pieces are made from a series of linked sets.
In the following pieces, I'm playing each chord twice, with a different timbre each time. The durations of the chords vary with a gaussian distribution.
In this first piece, successive chords overlap by 3 pitch classes.
In this piece, successive chords overlap by 2 pitch classes.
In this piece, by 0 pitch classes.
So in the first piece, there is little change from chord to chord. In fact, there are only two chords which alternate. This is the only way to make a sequence of [0135] with exactly 3 overlaps per step. In the last piece, the chords change the most. Notice that when pitch classes overlap, I also make sure the pitches themselves (the octave in which they placed) match to avoid octave relations.
In my first experiment in linked pitch class sets, I was unhappy with the lack of a sense of shape or direction in the composition. So I tried another experiment. I take a pitch class sets such as [0135]. Then I generate all forms of it available through transposition and inversion, 24 of them. I consider two forms to be "linked" if they share are least two pitch classes. I wrote a program to arrange these 24 forms as 24 nodes of a network, in which a two nodes are connected if they are linked. I pick one node as the start, then find the minimum path distance between that node and every other node in the network. E.g., some nodes have distance one, meaning they are one link away from the start node. Some nodes have distance three, meaning that at least three links need to be traversed to reach the start node.
Then I generate a chord sequence by traversing the network, giving the sequence an overall shape by staying near nodes with the minimum distance at the beginning, moving gradually to nodes with the greatest distance at the middle, then moving gradually back to nodes with the minimum distance at the end.
Here's a piece made this way, out of [01358].
Here's a piece made this way, out of [01578].
For more algorithmic music, go here.