Music composition

Is there a different way to compose music?

I don’t have the answer, but I’m interested in the question.

Of course, I’m really interested in automated computer composition, but a few things are blocking my progress in that area. 1) The algorithms I’ve come up with are too computationally demanding. Oh the things we humans could do with more computer power. That’s always a problem when you’re trying to do something that’s never been done before with computers, isn’t it? And that’s part of the reason it’s never been done. 2) I lack an understanding of how we humans perceive music. I think most people do. We can’t create a program that writes music like humans if we don’t understand how humans do it. Without that knowledge, we’re basically creating algorithmic and/or recombinatorial music, which can certainly be interesting and sometimes convincing, but it’s not the Holy Grail of the subject (at least, it’s not my Holy Grail).

Anyway, earlier today I was daydreaming of creating a programming language (for fun), and then I thought, hmmm… what if I create a programming language designed to help with the composing process? And I thought, well… that’s just dumb. But I kept thinking, well, how could the composing process be changed? Currently, I just use Overture to click in notes. I think these days there are two main ways to compose music: 1) Write down the notes. Either click them in to a notation program on a piano roll or a blank staff. Or, be old school and use tangible staff paper and a quill pen. 2) Play the music on an instrument. Piano, perhaps. Or even sing it.

Now, some people say “no, I compose in my head!” Oooh, what a genius you must be! I don’t think. All composers compose in their heads. The “composing process” I’m referring to is a matter of getting that music out. You either play it (and perhaps make a sound recording), or you create corresponding graphical symbols (sheet music) to represent how to play it (for either the computer to play, or other humans). What can make composing completely in the head difficult is mainly memory, not lack of intelligence. Writing down or recording the music helps solve this problem. They are processes to aid you in your act of creation while you compose in your head. If you have a good memory and are able to compose a piece completely in your head, don’t look for any praise from me, I really don’t think that’s a very amazing feat.

(On a side note, I think sometimes the composing process is mystified and romanticized to inhumanly heights by people who just aren’t as interested in it. We once had an article in the paper about a local teenager who composed a piece of music for something, and the writer seemed very amazed that a 15 year old could *gasp* write music. Either the writer was just being gracious, or he didn’t realize just how many young composers are out there, and how good they can be. Really, in any art there’s always talk of certain artists being “geniuses” and “prodigies” but, in my opinion, it’s mostly just a romanticizing. Anyone can become “great” with enough practice (it might even be easier to learn when you’re younger, making prodigies even less amazing). “Greatness” is subjective, and fame is an emergent property. People say “we don’t have any Rembrandts today!” or “we don’t have any Mozarts today!” Yes we do, they just haven’t been dead for hundreds of years yet. These artists are put on such romantically high pedestals it seems impossible to compare them to non-famous artists today. But I think the skill level is definitely there. The fame takes time. And you can be “great” (though probably not famous) at any art you’d like… if you’re willing to put in the hours… and it will take some long lonely hours of practice and study. But I do believe that genius is mostly hard work, not a mystical God-given gift given only to a few fortunate fellows (maybe the desire to to do all the required work is… it’s a gift, and a curse… usually when one daydreams of being a genius, one dreams of it coming easily). I might’ve already said all this is some past blog post, but I believe it and it’s a view that not many people seem to share, I think… as far as I can tell. Really I think it’s because people don’t like to think of fame as an emergent property but rather as something that’s destined for objectively “great” people. And that stems from our natural psychological problem of induction, of trying to find cause-and-effect processes where they don’t exist, of noticing patterns and implying improper things from them. So really everyone should just read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Awesome book.)

Where was I?

Ah yes, the composing process…

So, I’m trying to think another system of music representation. Sheet music is designed for a human to read and play the music back. Piano roll view is kind of an “easier to see” version for manipulating notes on a computer, but almost the same thing as regular notation. Both are really just a graph (or a collection of graphs) of time (x-axis) vs frequency (y-axis).

What if we add another axis?

That would be dumb.

But I’d still like to explore the possibilities of designing some other kind of representational system that’s designed for composing instead of for a human to play back. This system might be jarring for composers to use, at least at first. (“At least at first” hahaha… get it?) It would require composers to think in a different way. But that’s the point. Well, really the point is to allow composers to compose faster, and so the point is to experiment and see if there’s way to compose faster if we think about the process in a different way.

I have no specific ideas for this system right now. I’m at work, and I’m just blathering off the top of my mind to help the time go by. Two not-very-specific ideas I have for this system (I’m not sure if they’re any good):

1) Representing changes instead of just frequencies. What if we said something like “up 2, up 3, down 4, up 2” instead of naming notes?

2) Grouping notes. Right now, if you have 6 notes, you have to write all six notes. But what if we group these 6 notes, and then work with that group, and the changes that happen to that group? And then we can go farther and build groups of groups, and look at how those groups are different from one another, and how they’re the same. What kinds of patterns would we find and how could we work with them to compose new music?

I’m not really sure, and none of this may be very innovative anyway, but I am interested in exploring it and getting into more specifics about it.

The goals of the system would be to:

1) Compose faster (i.e. with greater ease). This would in turn allow us to…

2) Explore more possibilities while composing.

And, if possible:

3) Make composing more fun. And thus, attract more people to the act of composing, and help procrastinators and people with composer’s block.

Well, that’s my blather for today. I’ll continue to post my thoughts on this as I have them…

If you read all that, I have two things to say:

1) What’s the matter with you?!

2) Thank you, you are to be commended for your bravery and endurance.

P.S. It was nice to see Michael Giacchino win the Oscar for best score (even though the presenters had no idea how to pronounce his name).  I do love his Pixar film music work, he’s doing some of the best film music today, using those things called melodies.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Album continues to be worked on…

Just a little status update on my album…

I’m currently working on reorchestrating and mixing and writing an ending for my 15-minute piece Castle Sky, which will be the second-to-last track on the album.  In my humblest of opinions, it has some of my most delicious melodies.  (Is that humble?)  Then I only have a few other tracks to reorchestrate a bit, then the rest of this album work will be “post-production” I guess.  Almost there!

By the way, I did hire a fantasy artist to create the album cover image, and I think it looks awesome… there be dragons…

Oh, and on an entirely different note, I was playing chess on Google Wave yesterday and discovered that the chess applet really stinks; I couldn’t promote my pawn to a queen!  How is anybody supposed to play a proper game of chess with software like that?  Your pawn just gets stuck at the end of the board.  Very lame!  Whoever programmed it should be ashamed!  Though I realize Wave is still in beta, blah blah blah…  Maybe later I will post some of my games (and maybe some of my games from high school) with comments about them.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Paul Williams writes article about nothing

Does music need “professional” musicians?

Paul Williams, the songwriter and current president of ASCAP, recently wrote this article.  It’s pretty short, but one thing is missing from it: a point.  The only point I can see is that “piracy is bad.”  Well, duh.

Anyway, I’m going to go off on a little tangent here.  I think at some point in the future (perhaps still hundreds of years away) people will no longer be able to make a living off of writing music.  One reason is quite simple: computers will write music.  People won’t need to.  People will continue to write music, though, because it’s fun.  People being able to make a living off of writing music is, from what I can tell, a pretty recent phenomenon in the history of human existence.  (As are the sorts of economies we have now, for that matter.)  The creation of beautiful music doesn’t depend on people making a living off of it.  The reason people defend and fight for being able to make a living off of it is because it’s a dream come true! Being able to make a living off of doing something you love is just fantastic.  (At least, I imagine; it still hasn’t happened to me yet, but I’m working on it!)

So, I’ll whole-heartedly agree that piracy is bad, and I’ll defend protocols and systems that try to counter it (as long as they don’t get in the way of what us legitimate non-pirates want to do, which they do too often), but I won’t do this in defense of the music.  The music will always exist.  Piracy is bad for moral reasons, not monetary reasons.  Well, it is bad for monetary reasons, but I’m not against it just because I want more $$$$, like perhaps a number of other composers and publishers (and PROs?).

My automatic music generator

Recently, I’ve been continuing work on my computer program that will, if my daydreams come true, write music.  OK, it’s still such a difficult task that I probably won’t live to see (or hear) it work, but it’s still a puzzling challenge that obsesses me sometimes.  Anyway, I spent the day thinking about new algorithms to try out.  To help me do this, I began writing a semi-fictional dialogue.  In it, I appear as a character and I meet with William Wobbler, a character from my recently finished screenplay The Melody Box.  The two of us then contemplate how to create a computer program that can write music.  It’s a lot of fun to write, and if I ever succeed at my goal of creating this program and if it makes me insanely rich (a dream that motivates me), then I will someday release it to the public so that everyone can learn how it was done, and how my thought process worked while creating it.  Or if I die having failed (which is more likely), I can leave it for generations after me to perhaps have something to work with (though the possibility remains that it is and will forever be useless garbage, but, I don’t know, somebody out there might read it).

I guess that’s it.  I have to go back to work tomorrow.  Snow got me an entire week off, but the vacation’s over now!  (The week off did give me a torturous glimpse of what life might be like if I could ever make enough money writing or composing to work from home.  I risk becoming a hermit then, but it’s still something I cannot stop myself from desiring.)

By S P Hannifin, ago

Album update

We got about a foot of snow on Saturday, so I got off work all weekend and Monday.  Woohoo!  That was awesome.  Loved it.

It also gave me some time to work a bit more an my album, so here’s a little update on that as I get closer and closer to finishing this thing…

Some hours ago, I finished composing the last measures of a piece called A New Journey Begins which will be the last track on the album.  I have one more track to finish composing called Castle Sky.  That’s the one that’s over 15 minutes long.  I’m almost done; I just have to reorchestrate some things and compose an ending.

The album will be called Voyage of the Dream Maker, named after one of the tracks, and I think the name fits the spirit of the entire album.  It will have 12 tracks, over an hour of original music, most likely in the following order (you’ll recognize some of them from my YouTube channel, if you’re familiar with my YouTube channel):

1. Across the Kingdom
2. I Will Not Go Home Again
3. Voyage of the Dream Maker
4. The Secret Lullaby
5. Awaken
6. White Castle Waltz
7. The Dragon King
8. On the Edge of a Dream
9. Clockwork
10. Seeing Infinity
11. Castle Sky
12. A New Journey Begins

I can say with 90% certainty that the album will be available in May.  That might seem like a while (around 3 months), but that’s being gracious with myself; it might be out sooner.  I of course want it to be out as soon as possible, but I also want to be pleased with it.  Even after I finish composing, I want to go back through all the track recordings and tidy up everything as best I can, mixing/mastering, blah blah blah, whatever.  There’s the graphics for the jewel case and CD.  Then there’s the actual physical manufacturing and CD Baby processing.

And… that’s it, I guess.  So if you have to mark your calendars, I think May is a very safe bet.  Again, might be sooner.  Some of the process is of course out of my hands.

By S P Hannifin, ago

My good friend snow

My dreams and wishes came true today as we got over 8 inches of snow, allowing me to sleep in and stay home from my usual weekend job. And I get to stay home again on Sunday too. Woohoo! Thank you snow, I appreciate your kindness.

I spent the free time wisely. I slept (as I already said) and I worked on some music. I finished a 7-minute piece I call Seeing Infinity (Opus 58). It is the 10th piece completed for my upcoming album. I have two more pieces to finish up, so I’m hoping I will be able to have all the songs completed some time in February. One is over 15 minutes long, and it needs some (maybe a lot of) orchestrational editing and an ending. The other is much shorter, only 2 or 3 minutes long. It needs just a dash of orchestrational editing and an ending as well. So the melodies and structures and whatnot are all there, they just need a good polish. Then my album will be done, over an hour long with 12 pieces of music, some short, some longer, some in the middle.

Of course, then it will take another month or so to actually get the thing manufactured and processed by CD Baby. But that will be the easy part for me.

I guess that’s it for now.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Birthday presents and whatever

We celebrated my birthday on Saturday, and I must say, it was a happp birthday!  I got some hand-made bunny pajamas from my great aunt.  (I didn’t get the BB gun I wanted, though, because apparently I’d shoot my eye out.)  I also got this blu-ray and these books.  So, ’twas good.  And the cake’s already gone.

I also finished playing the game Portal the other day.  It’s a short game; only takes about 6-8 hours (though I’m sure one could get good at getting through the thing in less than an hour with some practice).  It’s a puzzle/action game, and is very addicting.  You basically use a “portal gun” (or whatever it’s called) and create portals in the walls that then connect to each other.  For examples, you could create a portal right in front of you and one right behind you to create an infinite hallway.  Or create one right above you and right below you to create a bottomless pit.  To win the game, however, you must create portals to solve puzzles, getting yourself and boxes and weird energy balls from one place to another, over and around obstacles.  And, at the end, it plays this really catchy song.  I haven’t played the bonus levels yet.

I still haven’t done any more programming for my Android game, but I did compose another short 2-minute piece of music called “Clockwork.”  It’s not really as bombastic as my other pieces; it’s kind of light-hearted background music.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Happy birthday to me and such

On Wednesday, I turned 24, twice as old as I was when I was 12!  It’s like I’ve lived to be 12 years old twice.  So I now enter my 25th year of life, and this website enters it’s 7th year of existence, if I’m doing that math right.

During my 24th year of life, I completed 9 pieces of music, opuses 46 through 54.  That’s not too bad, is it?  Opus 53 and 54 I just wrote in the past week, and they are pretty short pieces.  One is called “Awaken” and is only 1’30”, the other is called “I Will Not Go Home Again” and is only 2’12”.  I’m not sure yet whether or not I’ll put them on the album.

And I’ve already finished opus 55 yesterday, on Thanksgiving.  It’s a 4 minute lullaby I call “The Secret Lullaby.”  Why I call it a “secret” lullaby is a secret, I’m afraid, because it is a secret, and thus, a “secret” lullaby.  It is a very big secret, though, and you can’t handle the truth!  I think I will definitely put it on the album.  I cannot stop listening to it; I have severe “pleased composer syndrome” with it.

We haven’t celebrated my birthday yet, so I can’t tell you what presents I got.  Is 24 too old to be getting presents?  Of course not, you should get presents forever!

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.  We went out to eat, and I didn’t eat much, but I was stuffed.  My appetite is about a third of what it was during high school.  Of course, my backwards sleeping schedule could also be partly to blame; at the time of eating my body wanted to sleep, not digest.

Now it’s early Friday morning (about 2 AM).  I do hope to get some cheap blu-rays or something on sale today, but I’m not going anywhere early to stand in lines.  If they run out of the good stuff, so be it.

By S P Hannifin, ago

No NaNo and other stuff instead

I guess NaNoWriMo has officially started!  And … I don’t care.  I’ve once again changed my mind, and will probably not participate this year.  I have a bunch of other stuff I want to do, including finishing my album that I’ve been working on for over a year now.  I’m still about 10 minutes of music away from completing the thing.  I’m currently working on the last section of an unnamed orchestral piece.  I’m orchestrating / composing the climax and end, so it’s almost done.  Then I have four other pieces started that need finishing, though I don’t believe all of them will make it onto the album.  One will probably be called “The Journey Ahead” and I am fairly sure that it will indeed appear on the album as I think it really fits with the spirit of the other pieces.  And one will probably be called “Castle Sky” … that’s my long 15-minute orchestral piece (and still unfinished, but I don’t think it will be much longer).

Oh, I started a new project, one that I know I’ll finish eventually because it requires hardly any work at all from me.  I call it: The Mozart Listening Project.  The objective: to listen to the complete works of Mozart while following along with the scores.  As you can see on the side, I made a page about it.  Because it is just so important.  I just started working through his symphonies.  Got a long way to go.

Android Lastly, I was chatting on a music forum on Friday, and someone mentioned the new Verizon phone coming out called Droid, which will compete with the iPhone (though, of course, that’s some very tough competition).  Looking at the Droid rekindled my interest in creating an app.  It was something I looked into in college, when Google’s Android OS first came out, but somehow lost interest.  (And as far as I can tell, one must have a Mac to use the iPhone SDK, so I don’t think I’ll be trying to develop for the iPhone anytime soon … though, from a business perspective, that’s currently where most of the phone app market is, methinks.)

Anyway, I’m downloading the newest Android SDK and will perhaps try creating something with it.  Having long been interested in game development, two things excite me about the phone app market: 1) It’s rather new, and is still at a stage where a single developer can develop a sellable app by himself.  In most of the video game industry (except perhaps online Flash games), those days are long gone, never to return.  And perhaps one day the phone app industry will be like that too, but it isn’t now.  And 2) it can be very lucrative.  Actually, I’m not sure how lucrative it is.  I’ve heard that some iPhone apps are making millions.  But that’s only a very select few out of tens of thousands, so I suppose it’s like saying that the music industry can be very lucrative.  Well, yes, it can be, but only few a very select few.  Still, I’m guessing the phone app industry is more lucrative than the indie artist industry.  Unfortunately, I’m sure it’s even less lucrative for non-iPhone developers at this time, but who know?  With Google’s more open platform, Android or some similar OS might come to dominate the phone industry, just like Windows now dominate Macs, despite Apple’s oh-so-witty ads.  In fact, I predict that will happen in the next decade or so … Apple may still dominate the iTunes / iPod industry, but the iPhone might meet its demise with a collection of other phones that run the same OS and are thus compatible with the same programs…

And… I guess that’s all I have to say.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Deadline failure and other such things

I was hoping to compose 5 minutes of music a week, starting last Tuesday, but unfortunately I was only able to compose 2 minutes and 46 seconds by this past Sunday.  So I fail!  Shocking, no?

I blame a few things:

deadlineclock1)  My job. It’s a part-time job, so I can’t blame it for taking up too much time, but it does take up time.  So I must blame it.

2)  Fatigue. This is also job related.  When I have to work at 9 AM, that means I am pretty much tired throughout the day.  Which isn’t a problem for doing most things.  But I think a lot while I’m composing; it’s a very mind-intensive activity; it takes a lot of focus for me.  And when I’m fatigued, music has a way of lulling me off to the land of pleasant dreams, especially the incredibly fantastic music I compose.  So it is extremely difficult to compose while fatigued.  I did try taking some caffeine tablets, but alas, no effect.  I must have high caffeine tolerance.  I could feel it make my heart beat faster, but nothing else.  Of course, caffeine really isn’t supposed to be used to counter sleep-deprivation, so maybe it has nothing to with tolerance.  But that’s what some people seem to use it for and they swear by it.  It doesn’t help me though.

3)  Not being able to stay up all night. Again, job related.  Since I have to be at work at certain hours, I am not free to simply stay up as late as I want composing and then just sleep until I am not tired anymore.  (Not that this problem doesn’t plague most people.)  I sometimes seem to think more actively at night, perhaps because there are fewer distractions; the TVs and radios are off, no one’s on the phone and no one calls, etc.  But I can’t use the time to my advantage if I need to get some sleep in before going to work.

4)  Perfectionism. Or pickiness.  I spent 2.5 hours a few nights ago composing and orchestrating 4 bars.  I think that’s the longest 4 bars ever took me.  But I’m very pleased with the result.  Though I suppose I could fiddle around and tweak orchestration for many many hours, it always eventually has to come to a point in which I am pleased enough and must move on.

5)  Other stuff. For example, on Tuesday, I had to spend time tidying the house for guests.  Chores are evil and must be blamed.

That said, I must say I’m extremely pleased with the progress I’ve been making with my latest piece so far.  I went to bed yesterday with the melodies I composed annoyingly humming through my mind uncontrollably.

A big disadvantage of giving myself a deadline has emerged: I get angry. And stressed.  And a bit depressed.  And what fun is that?  I blame all the other stuff I must do, like go to work, which just makes going to work that much more painful and annoying.  So I’m very much considering throwing away the deadline and just composing as often as I can.  I don’t want to be angry by having goals and then not reaching them due to things like having to go to work that I can do little about.  Or I could just blame my undisciplined self for not being more disciplined and getting more done when I do have chances, but that won’t make me any happier either.

FEDERATIONS

federationsSince I don’t have much time for composing, I have even less time to read, but in what short moments I can spare, I’ve been reading a collection of science fiction short stories in a book called Federations.  Here are my very short reviews of the few stories from the book I’ve read so far.  They are only my subjective opinions, and I am perhaps more picky than most (ratings are on a scale of 0-5 stars):

Mazer in Prison by Orson Scott Card:  4 stars.  I actually read this in another book before, so I skipped reading it again, but I almost always enjoy Orson Scott Card.  Very good story from the Ender’s Game universe.

Carthago Delenda Est by Genevieve Valentine:  2 stars.  Though the premise was very interesting, the author didn’t seem to do much with it.  It was more of an idea story, as nothing much really happened.  A world was presented, some unimportant things took place, and that was it.

Life-Suspension by L. E. Modesitt:  0 stars.  Interesting characters with interesting dynamics.  But nothing very interesting happened.  And there were these battle scenes that were too cryptic for me with all their pilot-in-battle speak.

Terra-Exulta by S. L. Gilbow:  3.5 stars.  Not really a story, but a very fun fictional letter.  I enjoyed it.

Aftermaths by Lois McMaster Bujold:  1.5 stars.  Again, an interesting premise, but an uninteresting story.

Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy by Harry Turtledove:  2 stars.  Had it’s funny moments, but most of it’s humor was just stale and annoying, as if the author just wrote the story off the top of his head, writing down every stupid joke he thought of.  Didn’t really work for me.

Prisons by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason:  3.5 stars.  Started off a bit confusing, but once the story started rolling, it was actually quite good.

Different Day by K. Tempest Bradford:  0 stars.  Yikes.  While I like the idea of not portraying an alien race as a clichéd “monoculture” (as we humans certainly aren’t), this not-really-a-story didn’t really do much with it.  It’s just a three page ramble.

And that’s all for today, methinks.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Across the Kingdom

Just a quick post here to mention that I’ve uploaded another YouTube video of my latest piece, Opus 52, an orchestral piece called Across the Kingdom.  For some reason, I ended not using the harp at all.  Amazing, huh?  Much of the piece consists of the chord progression I-vi-IV-V (or sometimes vi-iii-IV-V).  In fact, the second half was almost entirely about seeing how many melodies I could compose to the progression, while not completely overdoing it or making the melodies sound too distant from each other.  Kind of makes the bass line a bit boring, but the focus doesn’t always need to be on you, you bassists!

So that makes 6 pieces for my upcoming album: White Castle Waltz, On the Edge of a Dream, The Dragon King, Voyage of the Dream Maker, Dance of Fools, and now Across the Kingdom.

I have at least 4 other pieces started that need finishing, some of which will surely be on the album as well.

By S P Hannifin, ago