It’s been a busy couple of months. I’ve been doing some freelance work, some volunteer work, selling stuff on eBay, and selling used books on Amazon. Haven’t had very much free time, but here’s what I’m working on:
I’m continuing to study music theory, particularly harmony and voice-leading, really taking a close look at how composers like Mozart and Tchaikovsky handle harmonizing their melodies in interesting ways. I’m looking forward to trying to put some of my observations into practice with some new music, but the days are flying by, so I can’t say when exactly I’ll get around to that.
I recently discovered flat.io, an online music notation tool that makes it easy to compose melodies or try out some harmonies on my smartphone while I’m away from the computer. It’s the best tool I’ve seen so far for music notating on a smartphone.
I also recently started playing around with PixiJS, a javascript library for rendering 2D graphics in the browser, able to utilize WebGL. I’d like to see if I can create a MIDI animator / editor with it. Although javascript can’t play an OS’s MIDI synths (as far as I know), I think it would still be interesting to have such a thing web-based. (I know there’s “Web MIDI” which I can look into, but that’s about the browser sending and receiving MIDI messages, not really “playing” a MIDI note.)
Actually, having a web-based MIDI player / editor (that I can have complete control over, both programming-wise and copyright-ownership-wise) is essential to my plan of creating online computer-aided song-writing software. I still really want to turn my melody generator into a full-fledged “music generator” and found a company around it.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to write this blog post using an iPad and a bluetooth keyboard, and it’s actually extremely annoying. The latest version of WordPress and this outdated iPad just don’t seem to play very well together. So I’m going to stop now. Happy Thanksgiving!