Bigger, Better Things

I'm happy to report that I've conquered my last significant technical obstacle - an issue of memory management - and can now begin to experiment with larger sonic forms and more subtle and sophisticated music. The Automatic Études are fun, but I want to progress to the composition of more ambitious works. Here's one more demo that illustrates the newfound capacity of my software to synthesize longer sound files. Now that I've fixed the memory issue, it should be able to create sound files of (almost) arbitrary length.

The software needs a name. I'll have to think up a clever acronym...

Finally, I need to spend much of the next few days completing and then defending my dissertation, so it may be a while before my next post.

Sound Quality Update

My software now allows synthesis at arbitrary sample and bit rates (well, at least at bit rates of 8 and 16; I haven't yet tried anything higher). It also allows sine waves to be "squared" to various degrees, reducing the interference and rounding errors that cause unwanted background noise.

This is a 44.1 kHz, 16-bit demonstration of the sound quality that I can now get. Unlike the earlier sound files in MP3 format, this is a WAV file and thus rather large relative to its duration.

Automatic Étude No. 3

Sound. Score.

Warning: this starts soft but ends loud, so be careful when listening. Suggestion: listen on speakers or headphones with good low-frequency response, and pay attention to the low notes.

Technology and Background

I have composed most of my music exclusively for acoustic instruments, and this project is my first significant exploration of electronic music. In some of my acoustic music, though, I have sought to incorporate explicitly mathematical or computational ideas and procedures. In particular, I have occasionally generated (what a sterile word in this context!) pitch and rhythmic content through the use of what I call "automata" (Google "cellular automata" for some conceptual background if you want): simple, rule-bound structures that evolve through time and interact with other such structures in interesting and complex patterns. Acoustic music (that is, music performed by humans on acoustic instruments) presents obvious difficulties with regard to the sonic realization of such automata. Human dexterity, after all, has its limits. Computers present a solution to these difficulties.

I decided to create my software in Java. Java is an object-oriented language (again, Google for background if desired) and thus amenable to the implementation of my ideas concerning the interactions of a plurality of simple, rule-bound structures. My software deals mostly in sine-wave synthesis. That is, its sonic output corresponds to a waveform that is the sum of sine waves, often many thousands of them. The software also constructs a graphical representation of these sine waves that I think of as a score. I originally intended the "score" as simply a diagnostic tool to determine at a glance whether or not my algorithms were working as intended, but it has evolved into something that invites deeper consideration of the accompanying music.

My software consists of four types of code:

1) Automata that algorithmically generate tones.

2) Filters that algorithmically modify these tones.

3) Sound and graphical output code.

4) Sinew.

I input the initial conditions of the automata and filters as a config file. The artistry of this type of composition lies in the construction of the automata and filters and in the choice of initial conditions, of which there may be many.

More music coming soon!

Automatic Étude No. 2: Arietta

Sound. Score.

Clearly, I must work out some issues regarding sound quality (e.g. static and buzzing). Some can be solved by a higher sample rate, but I think that others will require rather more work. These issues aren't my priority right now, though. For the moment, I just want to get the software infrastructure up and running.

My next post will probably not incorporate any new music. Rather, it will address the nature of my software and the goals of this project.

Automatic Étude No. 1

Dear friends and others,

I've lately been crafting a software architecture for sound synthesis and composition. I will use this blog to share the music that I create with it. The artistic and technological sophistication of both software and sound will increase with time. In the future, if anyone cares, I might post some technical details of my software and narrative and philosophical ideas of my music.

This is the sound and this is the score of my Automatic Étude No. 1.