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John Oswald - ‘Aria’ from Plunderphonics 69/96

From the liner notes:

We had a computer listen to Mr Gould playing the aria to the Goldberg Variations through a device which converts analogue pitches into digital notes. We fine-tuned or perhaps I should say finely untuned this ability so that the computer would hear approximately the right notes; it would add extra notes and spurious activity when it wasn’t sure what he had played. But it was good at getting most of the notes and the precise timing of the original. Once this info was collected into the computer it could be played back on any MIDI instrument or sampler. The sound could be electronic, or a toy piano or one of our klangprobes. But we had the opportunity to record a couple of the pianos Gould actually used, including the flagship CD318. This piano naturally has all the characteristics one associates with Glenn Gould’s style; including its quick, close action, and its lightness. So we then create a composite sampled keyboard using these recordings. There were some tuning anomalies with one of the pianos; we did some tuning of the samples intended to complement the harmonic structure of the ‘aria.’ Then the computer gave us a real time performance of its interpretation and we recorded it.

This digital guitar runs on Linux and has a touch screen interface. How cool is that? What is it exactly? The Misa Digital Guitar is a pressure-sensitive touchscreen MIDI controller that’s been built into a guitar body.

Very interesting. Guitar Hero made real? I like that the neck fights the “obvious” idea that a guitar with buttons can’t be anything like an actual guitar, when really what people who say that mean is “a guitar with only five buttons can’t be like an actual guitar.”

I’m curious how the mapping works from the touch screen to MIDI.

(via technabob)

This has interesting ramifications for my developing thesis ideas: How would you make a “piano” from scratch, if you could draw it? What decisions are effectively already made by the software that supports this?

(via a fantastic round-up over at CDM)

Mozart Did It First

In 1787, Mozart wrote the measures and instructions for a musical composition dice game. The idea is to cut and paste pre-written measures of music together to create a Minuet.
This site is an implementation of such a game. The music and table of rules for this game appear to have been published anonymously in 1787, and interestingly, the table of rules for this Minuet is identical to Mozart’s. However, it is not clear who the composer of these measures is.
There are 176 possible Minuet measures and 96 possible Trio measures to choose from. The result of a dice roll is looked up in a table of rules to determine which measure to play.
Two six-sided dice are used to determine each of the 16 Minuet measures (i.e. 11 possibilities for each of 16 measures). One six-sided die is used to determine each of the 16 Trio measures (i.e. 6 possibilities for each of 16 measures). So in theory, there are (11^16) * (6^16) = (1.3 * (10^29)) possible compositions. Of course, many of them will be closely related. Nevertheless, there are still many interesting possibilities.

This site uses the rules of Mozart’s dice game to create little MIDI ditties. Worth going just to click on a button that says “Make Music!” and have a website from 1995 play you a song that is indeterminate with respect to its performance.

This morning, there is a great feature over at Create Digital Music on the new software for creating user-generated tracks for Rock Band. It looks surprisingly simple to get it all set up. A highlight:

Anyone can get their music in the game. You don’t even need a label. You need a few (cheap) software tools, a computer, and some basic MIDI chops, and for a fraction of the cost of pressing a couple hundred CDs, any artist can get their work into Rock Band 2.

While Peter over at CDM wonders about the indie musicians who will now be able to release their songs in a new channel (side thought: is “playability in Rock Band” going to become a new influence in the studio?), I’m curious about possible artistic and legal ramifications.

I’m sure there is a system to make sure you don’t upload music that you don’t own the rights to (and you would need the master tracks or stems to make any song a proper rock band release), but what are the ramifications of keeping this interpretive practice limited to the labels or rights owners?

The more exciting possibility is for sound art/experimental music, I think. While I doubt a really experimental track could make it through the community vetting process and into general release, the possibilities for a collaborative, button-pressing, sound generating activity are pretty wild. It seems like Rock Band has parameters that are just restrictive enough to encourage some really out-there creativity.