Music Composition Decision Path

[gongchime]

"Musical cortex", that's good. Yes, I've played with band in a box but it doesn't have a Balinese style option. Hehe. Or a Trinidadian option based on African bata drumming. I also looked into getting Jammer but have never played with it. Some people did analysis of Ravi Shankar's music and tried to write a program for that. The database is large and the results are either rudimentary and sometimes just wrong. I hear what you're saying about just letting the musical cortex do it's wonders but for me it's still fun to try to describe as completely as possible what to tell a computer. So, I'd like to take my 100 favorite tunes and let the computer run through my processes just to hear the reslut. I'm sooooooooooo curious about that. As far as answering my own question concerning effective solutions to the creation of melodic series, is that one section of music needs to be different from the other section of music. What makes them sound different? One answers is the melodic contour. The problem is that there are always exceptions. There are tunes out there that have the same melodic contour in the verse and the chorus, so there needs to be metarule for, if you break one "rule/guideline", how to compensate for that? Back to my kicking of dead horses, if your chorus and your verse both start on the same note, that's one less thing to use in making them different. That's O.K. and happens a lot but then there's the question of what ELSE are we going to do to make them different? It seems to me computers haven't reached the metarule level yet.

[gongchime]

Another guideline is for melodic rhythm. I often use part of the inversion of one of the other sections in rhythmically augmented form in the Bridge section. It hides the fact that the inversion has the same melodic rhythm as the section it was taken from. Rhythmic displacement also helps hide that.But lots of music doesn't do that. Or it's the Chorus which has longer note values instead of the Bridge.

[mikhalt]

i think the machine can be valid, but professional consultation, advice. etc from qualified "human" professionals are always the best I believe:)hi Im new here just sayin hi

[gongchime]

I just remembered that, for classicists, folk music is often a "database" that composers turn to for melodic inspiration. Hi Mikhalt

[ggalen]

Gongchime,Band In A Box (BIAB) now has a style editor where you can do anything you want. Could be a great starting point for your experiments.It can also take a midi file and extract the patterns out of it.It can take a .WAV audio file and extract the chords.BIAB is entirely based on generating patterns of patterns.I love it for laying patterns on top of other patterns that were not originally designed to go together. Say, putting an African song and drums on top of what was originally a ballad...and then changing the African tempo as well.It also has a "solo maker" and melody maker". If you were to use those things in original ways (like having it play the midi guitar rhythm or solo it generates with drums instead of the guitar sound)....maybe it would be good for idea generation for your purposes.I just think it might be a starting point for some of your musical and rhythmic explorations.Could be interesting.

[gongchime]

Actually, I played with band in a box a looooooooooooong time ago. I don't know what it's capable of now. Maybe I have should have another look/listen.

[milfus]

well the problem is, there can still be a human seed, and human evalutation, then all the theory over the years quantified down, it could make for a dumb composer easy, then fudging it around a tiny bit and walla

[Pinkstar]

wow, I feel like I'm in math class, my head is spinning, while I was reading I started to totally check out, lol. PS: Because this seems hard for me to read I will read it over and over...thank you for the incredible lesson.xoxoJVBhttp://www.myspace.com/ottosdaughter

[gongchime]

You are now totally within our power. Sleep I say. SLEEP!!! zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[milfus]

waha, we've been planting subliminals the whole time *evil cackle*