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April 02, 2008

Bedtime Music - Making use of stochastic and echo vertices

Rob composed something really interesting with the latest build of Noteworks today. He calls it "Bedtime Music." I don't know if that's an official title, but it certainly works for me.

Bluestream keywords: Bedtime Music

Here's Rob's description:

Put this on for a while as you're tuning out for the night (the motor is @ the bottom). As you can hear I was very much inspired by John's work, but this has an open fifth as the central theme. The general movement is upwards and to the left... and then meandering back down.

Rob makes really good use of stochastic vertices - particularly in conjunction with feedback loops. Sometimes the loop feeds back into itself, and sometimes it feeds into a [set of] sink rest vertex [vertices]. I had some of these same structures in my last (much less interesting) composition; it's interesting to see the patterns/tropes that emerge from the fundamental node types. Same with the motor, as Rob has characterized them - the two rests pointing towards each other. They drive the rest of the piece.

The echo nodes (i.e. the blue nodes with the letter E inside them) are something new this time. The idea is that an echo expresses in the same way that the calling node (or the caller's caller, and so on if applicable) expresses. The interesting part, however, is that these echo nodes can effect a change on those input nodes - for example, transposing the input key, or increasing/decreasing the volume or duration. Rob uses this to really interesting effect to construct a simple subnetwork that kind of generates [recursive] thematic motifs.

Patrick was pretty excited when he saw Rob's work this evening. He IMed me:

I have been listening to [Rob's composition] for like 20 minutes.... [I]t has been super different the whole time i have been listening to it.... [I]t is like someone is performing for me.

This notion fascinated me. In a sense, we are not creating compositions with this software; we are abstracting one level higher, where we're designing a composition embedded with its performer, in that we're specifying constraints on how a performer (read: stochasticity) can interact with the network. In fact, I hesitate to call these creations compositions, because they're more than that; perhaps I should start calling them, in earnest, Noteworks. Anyway, it's like we've successfully broken down an artificial barrier between performance and composition. Or something close to this.

The fact that Patrick could listen to a network that was ostensibly so simple - and yet derive enjoyment out of it for twenty minutes and more - tells me that we're really on to something pretty incredible here. I mean, a lot of the credit has to go to Rob's talent as a composer, for sure. But all of us have been incredibly surprised and pleased at our success in designing a tool in which the "core mechanic" is to define the composition as a set of relationships between sounds.

Also: we finally have the Internet nodes implemented - though they were not present in the above notework. Internet nodes allow you to connect noteworks over the Internet - effectively expanding your notework across machines and constructing a far more sophisticated soundscape.

Posted by umbaugh at 07:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack