Seaside canon, for Douglas Hofstadter

What?

Here's a musical crab canon inspired by a blog post from Julia Galef, who wrote quite an impressive crab canon poem. My musical interpretation of her poem is a crab canon too. It differs from my previous crab canon in the following aspects:

1.  This canon was conceived after serendipitously finding a poem written by Julia Galef, who kindly granted me permission to use it.
2. Compared to the previous crab canon, this one uses more and longer pedal notes. What can I say - I just love pedal notes! 
3. In contrast to my previous crab canon, this one modulates to different keys. Have you discovered my free modulation book yet?
4. As a nice variation on a typical crab canon (where you can reverse the score), here you can also reverse the raw audio samples. That's right! When you reverse the raw audio samples and listen to the result, you get the same piece again. Mind you: I'm not just talking the notes, but also the timbres! Nothing should sound more "backward" than in the forward version of the piece. You can try it out! Download the raw audio and import it into your favourite audio editor. Then listen to it, and relisten to it in reverse.
5. The spectrogram (slowly appearing in black on white) looks like the sea, and the score layed on top of it in colored rectangles looks like a frontal view of a crab. Very appropriate for a crab canon about seaside :) Ok, that's a joke (or not? Try squinting your eyes... :D ) 

 With respect to the images that pass by: in black on white you can see a spectrogram of the piece. In colored rectangles I've overlayed half of the notes that are being played in the canon (four voices). The other half of the notes you hear come from those same voices simultaneously playing backwards.

 I've developed a systematic method for constructing music canons, crab & palindrome canons, and table canons using Lilypond, fully documented in a series of articles that you can freely download and use. It's advised to read them in the order listed below:

Tutorial on my technique for writing a Canon
How to write a crab Canon
6-part Invention
How to write a table Canon

I'm aware that the method I devised in its current form still has limitations and does not necessarily yield music that can compete with the Big Composers, but who knows... I  still have some ideas for further experimentation. And besides, it's just too much fun :)

Modulation

Modulation is the art of smoothly moving from one musical key to another. Modulation is one of the ways to make your music more interesting. If this sounds intriguing and you know how to read music notes, stay with me.

Three weeks ago, I set out to learn something about modulation. I took notes while doing so, and I'm making those notes available for anyone interested in the subject. The notes so far encompass 257 (!) pages full of modulations between different keys. Each modulation each time is written out in all keys, leading to a catalogue of modulations from any key to any key (well... almost. It's a work in progress). It also contains brief explanations about the underlying principles that make the modulation work. Using those principles, it should be possible to create new modulations yourself.

Most of the material is illustrated in the context of classical music theory (but all the underlying principles illustrated there apply also to jazz/blues/pop/gospel/...), but part III also contains some beginnings of Jazz and Gospel cadenzas.

Downloading?

Sure. The document is available under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. The source code is available on sourceforge. It requires lilypond, lyx and LaTeX to "compile" to .pdf.

You can also download a prebuilt .pdf from the files section.

If you have downloaded and skimmed the book, be sure to comment either here or on the book's forum.

How to write a table canon

Table canon

According to wikipedia:

A Table canon is a retrograde and inverse canon meant to be placed on a table in between two musicians, who both read the same line of music in opposite directions. As both parts are included in each single line, a second line is not needed.

I thought there should be no reason to limit one musician to one line of music (or to limit one side of the table to one musician), so I created a table canon with two lines of music per musician (or two musicians per side of the table).

Result

You will hear three parts: part I is a 2-voice theme, part II is the same 2-voice theme upside-down, finally part III consists of part I playing simultaneously with part II. The actual piece consists of part III only. The rest is added for demonstration purposes. You will notice that the 2-voice themes sometimes sound a bit awkward. Compared to my previous musical constructions, it was harder to construct a theme that sounds reasonably interesting and reasonably well together with itself playing backwards and upside down in 4 voices.

Or alternatively, listen to it on soundcloud:

I've written up the method used to create this piece. Click here to download the article. You may have trouble downloading the article with some versions of internet explorer (in that case, use chrome or firefox instead).

Explanation about technique used in writing my 6-part invention

Download the article by clicking this link. You may have trouble downloading it with some versions of internet explorer. In that case use chrome or firefox instead.

You can hear the result of the tutorial in my previous post.

Call for contributions: YouCoLeLe Twilight

YouCoWhat?!

Maybe you remember my enthusiastic blog post with respect to tunestorm. Unfortunately, the submission deadline has long passed and the organizers do not seem to find the time to broadcast the submissions. That's not exactly the way to make and keep people enthusiastic - perhaps quite the contrary.

I still very much like the concept of a tunestorm: let a group of people create music around a common theme, each in their own style. As a variation on the tunestorm theme, I thought of trying something similar, from now on called YouCoLeLe.

"YouCoLeLe" is an acronym and stands for Youtube Composer's Legendary League. The idea is for people to create music around a common theme, put that music on a site like Youtube or SoundCloud, and tag it with "YouCoLeLe <Theme>" where <Theme> should be replaced with the theme the music was created for. This way, people can contribute without really having to obey a strict deadline. Nevertheless, each time a new theme is chosen, a target date is set, after which a compilation of "contributions so far" will be made. One important difference with tunestorm is this: even if this blog dies or I don't find time to update it anymore, anyone can still find back the contributions by searching for videos/sound streams tagged with "YouCoLeLe ".

So what's the first theme?

The first theme is Twilight. It's up to you to interpret the assignment as you like. The target date is set to 1 september 2012.

What are the constraints?

I don't want to restrict your creative freedom too much, meaning that you are free to create something that in your opinion illustrates the theme. You are free to chose your instruments or musical style. You can create songs or pieces or soundscapes... whatever floats your boat. For your own sake, just make sure that you have the right to use whatever materials you happen to reuse. Legal reuse of material available under creative commons license is highly recommended by the way: that way the new contributions also become available under creative commons license, and who knows: perhaps someone else will reuse your material in their creation. If you create original work of your own of course you can choose not to release it under a creative commons license (although I would highly recommended for The Greater Good.)

Are you going to keep babbling or can we hear some music?

As it happens (surprise, surprise), I have made an entry for "YouCoLeLe Twilight" which you can hear here:

If you want to play it yourself, you can download the score by clicking on this link. Or you can browse the score (without the poem, due to copyright restrictions) here:

Finally...

Feel free to drop me a note with a link to your contribution. Don't be scared to contribute - it's for fun only. It's not a competition, and the whole thing is not meant to judge your work, although it can be a way to find an audience and a way to get feedback on your work if you are looking for that. Better indicate it explicitly in that case.

Unless big disasters happen I will create a compilation of contributions on this blog after the target date. As I see it now, the contributions would be listed with my personal comments on them (if the author indicated they wanted comments), ordered according to the date on which I became aware of the contribution. Should I forget to do so, feel free to remind me of my promise!

I hope to see (m)any contributions :)