On Approaching Composition Line-By-Line (i.e. Per Voice) vs Vertically (i.e. Chord Progressions)

Just saw a very interesting video looking at music theory / analysis at a different way than "chord chord chord chord chord" (to paraphrase the video) 😜

Instead, this video argues that we should be focussing more on the horizontal movements of the parts (i.e. "voice leading"), which thus helps draw your attention towards the flow / journey of the piece more...

Link: "Inside the Score - Most musicians learn harmony wrong"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJYj57TUKj

 

[MusicViz Project] Part 3 - Breakdown of FFMPEG "showcqt" Experiment

This is the third installment of my ongoing series of posts on one of my long-term projects to develop a new automated technique for visualising music.

To motivate today's discussion, here is the final video clip rendered from the experimental technique being discussed in this post: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTMpzmdI9qQ

 

And here is the command used to render that:

ffmpeg -y -i 20230803-v02.flac -filter_complex "[0:a]showcqt=s=500x1920:axis=0:cscheme=0.6|0.7|0.1|0.1|0.8|0.5,crop=500:1392:0:4000,setsar=1,transpose=2[vcqt]; [0:a]showwaves=mode=cline:s=1920x100[vs]; [vcqt][vs]overlay=y=H-100[v]" -map "[v]" -map "0:a" -c:a aac "mv_20230803.mp4"

 

Let's annotate that to show the different parts more clearly (see the breakdown following this for a rough description of what each part does):

ffmpeg -y -i 20230803-v02.flac -filter_complex "[0:a]showcqt=s=500x1920:axis=0:cscheme=0.6|0.7|0.1|0.1|0.8|0.5,crop=500:1392:0:4000,setsar=1,transpose=2[vcqt]; [0:a]showwaves=mode=cline:s=1920x100[vs]; [vcqt][vs]overlay=y=H-100[v]" -map "[v]" -map "0:a" -c:a aac "mv_20230803.mp4"

Reflections on my time working with Lilypond

Recently, I saw a post from a music student mentioning that they were thinking of writing up some stuff on the techniques they'd learned while using GNU Lilypond - i.e. a LaTeX-like "music typesetter" with its own custom input/programming language (doused / polluted with a heavy dose of Guile-Scheme).

This post gathers up some of my own notes on my own journey with these tools, and how this has tied into where I am today. Come to think of it, this year actually marks something like "just over two decades ago" that I was doing this shit (since IIRC, I probably started doing all this back in 2004!) - jeez... time flies and makes you feel old when put like that!

Mozart's "Magic Flute" Opera - Papageno - YouTube Rabbithole

For anyone who needs a bit of a cheer-up on this grey rainy day, here's a bunch of clips of a fun duet from a Mozart opera. 😍

1) The clip that started this rabbit hole, featuring (Huw Montague Rendall & Elisabeth Boudreault) 

This was the first time I'd ever heard this piece. I really loved the energy of the performers and the chemistry they had. (Also have to say that Elisabeth's little dance there at the end was quite cute LOL ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP9V7_fevgQ

2) Trying to find out what this song was about / the context for it, I came across this next clip from The Royal Opera (feat. Christina Gansch and Roderick Williams). 

This one had subtitles, and between these + the staging (i.e. all those kids), the meaning of the song suddenly all made sense (besides bringing back memories of the portrayal of Mozart in Amadeus) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q0ZDZB-AnM

3) From a comment on that one, I learned that the following is apparently a famous performance by Detlef Roth and Gaële Le Roi.

The key highlights of this were seeing the matching costumes along with a bit more of the context leading up to this scene, along with watching the actors' snuggly expressions as they performed the scene. Personally though, I thought the soprano's singing in this one sounded a bit "soft" compared to the others, and didn't really like it that much TBH.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87UE2GC5db0

4) This final one (a "children's version" from 25 Feb 2024 in Vienna apparently, featuring Rolando Villazon and unknown soprano) takes the cake!

I love the staging of this - particularly how it's this really fun + playful setting within a gigantic opera theatre (seriously... look at all the tiers of seating/boxes in this thing) that looks like it was put on specifically to expose kids to classical works in a much more intimate and less intimidating setting. 

Also this one comes with a lot more context, along with the matching costumes, and everything...

All in all - I thought this was just  SO. MUCH. FUN! 😍

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaldPP44oas

[MusicViz Project] Part 2 - Motivations + Rough Directions

This is Part 2 of what will hopefully be a series of posts documenting my attempts to build a music visualiser for automatically creating interesting dynamic visualisations for my back-catalogue of music I've been writing + recording of the past few years. Last time I checked, in total there's probably somewhere between 3 and 5 hours of "finished" or "presentable" tracks, with most averaging about 1 minute in length (most come in under that around 52-55 seconds), with only a few reaching 1:10 mins, and only 2-3 blowing out to ~2:30 mins.

Most notably, there are 2 playlists (or really "albums" by this point) of material I produced during the few months I was holed up in my room writing my thesis. During most of the day and night, I'd be listening to these playlists while slaving away in my text editor, desperately trying to make some progress (some days much more successfully than others); and then, to take a break / recharge, I'd write or record some music based on fragments that would come to mind. Rinse and repeat for several months. As my thesis grew, so too did these playlists, which each ended up over an hour long in the end.

For several years, I've been wanting to package these up in a suitable format to release into the world. Currently, only a small handful of these tracks have been heard by anyone other than myself, but certainly not the entirety of these playlists in their totality. Yes, granted, the expected audience is probably vanishingly small, as they are certainly not "mainstream", and don't fall neatly into established categories... hence, even if/when I do release these, I hardly expect many people to actually listen. Then again, if anyone's interested, I have actually since produced a few more hours of similar / evolved material since then LOL - heck, I'm listening to one of the newer playlists as I write this, and even I am surprised by some of the material I recorded even a few years ago.

[Music Viz Project] First Version of Pitch-To-Colours Mapping

After procrastinating over this for a few years, I've finally put together a first version of a mapping for the colours I typically associate with each pitch - one of the key elements for the music visualisations I've always wanted to generate for all the music I've been writing + recording over the past few years.

This is actually my second attempt at putting together such a chart. The first one (which I can't seem to find right now) was only partially complete, as at the time, I kept struggling over whether I'd picked the perfectly calibrated shades for each, which then meant I never got the basics down.

 

So without further ado, here's a rough chart:

 

 (Disclaimer: I wanted to clean it up more, but Musescore doesn't let me easily insert/delete excess notes in the middle of a line without re-entering the notes and then losing the colours. So... meh!)

Tan Dun's Water Concerto

I just finished watching a performance of Tan Dun's "Water Concerto" tonight after seeing a clip earlier in the day and being quite intrigued about it.

In short: It's an absolutely fascinating work!

A very interesting mismash of disparate elements put together in interesting ways...

Tan Dun(譚盾) - Water Concerto (水協奏曲) performed by Yi Chen

3 Pieces for Christchurch - March 2019 - #WeAreOne

A month ago today on 15 March 2019, a deadly terrorist attack was unleashed upon two mosques in my hometown, Christchurch NZ. Inspired by and in response to the outpouring of emotion in the wake of this horrific event, I wrote a whole bunch of music during this time - I guess partly as a coping mechanism in the wake of each day's events. From these pieces, I've picked the following three as they fit well together under the general theme of healing for a broken community.

March Music - Musescore 2 Experiments

Over the past few weeks, I've been getting quite a lot of interesting melodic snippets popping up at random times (and much more frequently than in the past). So, I've taken to firing up Musescore and jotting them down while they're fresh (and also, since a lot of these just sound so neat when done this way). Plus, earlier in the month, I finally upgraded to version 2.0 at last, which has brought with it a lovely new Soundfont (based on Fluid; I especially love the Piano and Marimba sounds on this; the Flute could still be better on long notes, and I still don't dare to touch any of the Strings as they typically sound dreadful XD); that and the awesome "Continous Mode".

Here are two of the more "complete" pieces I managed to bash out using this (today's one is first, followed by an older one from week or two ago).

Start of Autumn - Music

Here's a bunch of lite tracks I recorded this afternoon - the first weekend of Autumn here (sob). It's been a sunny (if mild) day, though it's clear that Summer has ended...



My favourite is the second one (especially that light rhythm in the background), as it echoes some of the cool music out there in various non-Western-classical music traditions (i.e. all the very cool stuff)

PS.  After a few long weeks, I've finally finished data collection on my last experiment for my thesis. Yay!

Port Hills Fires - Violin Layering Tracks

Last week, a series of out of control wildfires raged across the Port Hills to the south of Christchurch, destroying houses, sending massive plumes of smoke billowing into the sky (and visible from space), and leaving thousands of hill-suburb residents temporarily homeless (after often getting only minutes to evacuate).

Feb 22 - Violin Layering Tribute

Today marks 6 years since the devastating Feb22 quakes here in Christchurch. Here are a bunch of tracks I recorded to commemorate the event this year.

"Regal" - Orchestral Tune

One morning, a melody came to me while having breakfast, so I spent a few minutes transcribing it. The whole thing kindof snowballed however once I realised that the French Horn can't actually play some of the higher notes I'd been building up to, hence the introduction of additional instruments, leading to horn + trumpet + strings (vln 1, vln 2, vla)  + flute  (added in that order).  Apart from the crappy quality of the synthesizer (blame the MuseScore folks :P), the following clip captures what I set out to achieve that morning quite well I think (plus, it turned out quite nice too IMO :)

Violin Layering Highlights - January 2017

Over the past few weeks, I've continued playing around with my "Violin Layering" series of improvised recordings. Here is a collection of some of the highlights from this month. Hope you enjoy :)

Reflections - Piano Improv - Mid-Winter

I was trying to free up some space on my phone over the weekend when I stumbled across the following recording I'd made of myself thumping a piano back in July (probably in the depths of trying to complete a never-ending writeup of a previous experiment). Unfortunately, the timestamp info got clobbered during the file transfer process, so I can't remember when exactly this was. Nevertheless, listening to this again, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out - it almost sounds like I actually know how to play the piano (TBH, I don't! ;)

Horn Theme

And now for something different... a little horn theme I came up with this morning. Probably indirectly inspired by some similar bits and pieces from a John Williams score or from one of the cues from Thomas Newman's Bridge of Spies score.



Disclaimer: Any similarity to any of the aforementioned scores or anything else is entirely coincidental.

Violin Improv - Moody/Atmospheric Tracks

Today's latest set of tracks:


It's been a while since I've had a chance to have some fun and do this (between being sick and catching up on all the work I'd had to put aside during that time). Once again, everything is just me improvising each track by overdubbing them a few times. Overall, I'm quite happy with how this set turned out - they turned out quite thematically similar (apart from the last one, which was an interesting exercise in seeing what sort of random special fx I could come up with).

Violin Layering Songs - 20160730

Here's another bunch of songs I recorded for fun (and a break from "work-like" things) this afternoon.



This time, I tried to keep things a lot more "tonal" than in previous recordings, so hopefully more people will find it less unsettling to listen to. Another thing I was playing around with here was tweaking the left/right balance and relative volume levels of each track (apologies in advance if one or two are a bit on the "loud" side) - I ended up optimising for headphones (tracks "8" and "3" in particular really sound a lot better this way; in particular, "3" only seems understandable this way).

My personal favourite of this set is the first one on the playlist ("8 - Horse Riding"). While there may have been a few places where the timing isn't quite perfect enough, the overall effect is quite nice, and really gives off that equine "galloping" feel to it :)

The Sea - Music inspired by a visit to the beach

It's taken a few weeks to get around to it, but I've finally gotten around to uploading the set of tracks I recorded for use as a soundtrack to a bunch of clips I filmed while spending some time out at Sumner beach watching the waves. You can see one of those clips (a real-life homage and fan-art for Pixar's "Piper") and the track I specially recorded for it here.



It was really relaxing spending time just staring out at the waves as them came crashing in to the shoreline. While the picture above shows the tides as they started to recede, they were initially much higher, and would come in thick and fast.

Seagulls vs Waves Clip

Keeping with the theme of "fan-art" of sorts, here's a little video I put together from footage I shot while out a Sumner beach on Saturday afternoon...



From the video's description:

A pair of seagulls hunting for food along Sumner Beach, between the receding tides. Filmed yesterday during a relaxing stroll along the shoreline out at Sumner, after a great lunch. The sea yesterday looked as I've never seen it - the water level was really high, and the waves just kept coming in thick and fast.

The scene reminded me a lot of Pixar's amazing short film "Piper" (showing in front of Finding Dory). It's one of my absolute favourite shorts! Great story, wonderful animation, amazing rendering, and OMG cuteness overload!

While this shaky phone-cam (at reduced resolution to save disk space) doesn't hold a candle to that, this clip is still very much in the same spirit!

The soundtrack here is a little track I recorded specially for this footage. It's done using the "Violin Layering" techniques I've been playing around over the past month of so - basically, I recorded the first pass of the music watching the video (via my phone), and then worked on recording extra tracks for it while keeping in mind the general mood I was going for (in addition to the key beats of the clip). It's not quite 100% there yet, but as a first attempt at doing this, I'm overall happy with the results!