Saturday, April 25, 2009

Floating the Lower Hoh Take 5

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This version includes several mirror functions. Where earlier sections used predominantly the utonality triad 5/(4:5:6), which is a standard just minor chord in A, there are now complementary sections that use 10/(7:9:11), higher up the utonality diamond.

The overtone series can be thought of as overtones 4:5:6 making up a major chord, and higher up overtones 7:9:11 extending that out. The undertone series is the opposite of overtone series. Other mirror functions have the choice of notes to play proceed sequentially, then backwards.

The piece is scored for sine waves. This is the first time I haven't used orchestral samples in a piece. No more jokes about fake but accurate. The intonation is 53 tone equal divisions of the octave approximating just.

Source Code


Csound Score
Macro Preprocessor Source Code
Pascal Source code

Floating the Lower Hoh Take 2


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This is a work in progress...


The lower reaches of the Hoh have dense vegetation on both sides of the river. This section gets upwards of 240 inches of rain a year. Every storm that hits the Northwest passes over this region, dropping moisture by the bucketful. Cool, damp, quiet, and relentlessly moving towards the ocean to start the cycle again.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Floating the Lower Hoh

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This is a work in progress...


45 seconds into the work, we have some changes on the way.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Sines

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This is a work in progress...


Tobiah wrote on the Csound mailing list a challenge to write a score for a very simple Csound orchestra file.

I have an idea for a brief informal contest. Given a simple,
one-oscillator orchestra, provide a score which produces the
most beautiful piece.

I offer an orchestra that I crafted for the purpose
of this event. One can make use of very limited
envelope an pan controls. Obviously, the craft will
be in the score generation program (although one is
welcome to hand edit her entry!).

If there is interest, I suggest a seven day window
for this challenge. Only the scores should be
submitted at first. We can look at source code
later. For large scores, a URL might be best. I can host
scores if you send them to me in an archive format.

Thanks,

Toby


sr = 44100
ksmps = 1
nchnls = 2

giSineFunc ftgen 1, 0, 65536, 10, 1

instr 1

;***** INIT SECTION *****
iDur init p3
iVol init p4
iStartPitch init p5
iEndPitch init p6

iAttack init p7
iDecay init iDur - iAttack

iPanStart init p8
iPanEnd init p9

;***** SYNTH SECTION *****
kEnv linseg 0, iAttack, iVol, iDecay, 0
kPitch expseg iStartPitch, iDur, iEndPitch
aSig oscili kEnv, kPitch, giSineFunc

kPan linseg iPanStart, iDur, iPanEnd

aLeft = aSig * kPan
aRight = aSig * (1 - kPan)

outs aLeft, aRight

endin


Never one to shirk a contest, I made some modifications to my Csound preprocessor to write the fields that his orchestra expects, and the results sounded kind of like all my other music made with my Csound preprocessor. The input to the preprocessor is here, and the Csound score is here. There are lots of debugging messages in the score as comments. When I've had more time to work on it, I'll remove them. I had to make one modification to the sine wave generator function. I replaced giSineFunc ftgen 1, 0, 65536, 10, 1 with an equivalent ftable entry f1 0 65536 10 1 .

My version of Csound is 4.19, which is many levels back from the current version. It doesn't support giSineFunc. But since I wrote the preprocessor in Turbo Pascal, which is still running today with a last touched date of May 2, 1989, I can't complain. Software currency is for losers.