Drums in 12/8 - version 8

This one is finished now. I will name it later. Play it here

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Drums in 12/8 - more gliss & trills

This is a work in progress. Play it here

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Drums in 12/8 - more

This is a work in progress.

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Drums in 12/8

This is a work in progress.

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Drums in 9/8 - again

This is a work in progress.

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Another take.

Drums in 9/8

This is a work in progress.

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Drums

This is a work in progress.

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Lots of fun with a sewer pipe and Csound.

Doxology

This is a work in progress.
Doxology, a song of praise.

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Jesus, All My Gladness - take 10

Take 10 is remixed with a bit less high brass, shorter holds, and more tuba. I like tuba.

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Jesus, All My Gladness - take 9

This is the final version of the piece. I've made a few small changes to the durations of some of the long and short notes. The long half notes can now end a bit early, leaving some space in the sonority, and the short mallet instrument notes last longer.

As I said when I started this hymn, the intonation I'm using is not attempting to be historically accurate. Dear JS would roll in his grave at the heavy use of the 7/4 ratio, for example. There is no evidence that he ever considered the interval in any way useful or musical.

I chose ratios with the single goal of using the lowest possible integers in each chord. Take a look at the first phrase below, where I use two different ratios for the tenor Ab, first 8/5 in chord number 3, then 14/9 in chord number 7, 3 72-EDO steps down:

In chord numbers 8 & 9, I switch from G on 3/2 to 40/27, in order to harmonize with the D 10/9, which was forced by the chord number 7. No sane composer would have a melody haphazardly change from one version of a note to another in a melody. But when you slow everything down, it makes sense harmonically. At least to me.

I used a spreadsheet to multiply all the ratios in a chord by all the other ratios, and then minimized the integers inside the chord. See the following chart for the first ten chords. Click it to make it bigger.

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Jesus, All My Gladness - take 8

This is a work in progress. The tuba had the wrong octave in take 6, so I removed it. I also added the ability to select a sample up or down from the one that matches the note, to allow more changes of timbre.

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Jesus, All My Gladness - take 5

This version is more or less complete. I'll need to do some balance checks on different speakers to make sure the levels are correct.
Click to make the image bigger and see the note numbers in 72-EDO.

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Jesus, All My Gladness - another approach

This is a work in progress. Today's version attempts to get back to some basics after wandering far afield over the past few weeks.

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Jesus, All My Gladness - retuned & arpeggiated

This is a work in progress. Arpeggios mask the tuning. You'd hardly know it was 7-limit just.

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Jesus, All My Gladness - retuned

Today's post is the complete hymn retuned to 7-limit just intonation, approximated by 72 EDO. I think I may have to do this again in true just, because there are some chords that beat. My goal was to have no interval in a chord beyond 7-limit, but I had to fudge a few. This is in no way a claim that Bach would have liked this. It's just an experiment in some odd harmonies. Click to enlarge the picture and see the 72-EDO notes chosen.

The next step is some transformations of using slides and trills.

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Jesus, All My Gladness

This is a work in progress.

Today's post is an arrangement of the first two lines of a hymn called Jesus, All My Gladness. It was harmonized by J.S. Bach. I can't say that I remember it from my days as a soprano in the boy choir. I sang in St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Albany, NY, from around the 3rd to the 6th grade. We must have screeched through it a time or two.

This is a very challenging tune to render in 72 EDO, 7 limit just intonation. I went through it and bent all the notes I had to to make it sound good vertically. I was merciless, and ended up with some very strange horizontal ratios, including 50/27, 40/27, and 35/27, which were necessary to keep the D at 9/10 and still have a decent minor chord. We are basically sinking down a step in 72 EDO to keep the notes sounding in tune, then just arbitrarily coming back up a step to return to the notes we started at.

The numbers in the image above in blue are the chord numbers, from 1 to 22. The numbers in green are the 72 EDO note numbers. I'll add the ratios later if I can find room. I'm still considering what to do about the chord changes. I've used 18 pitches in what would typically be rendered in 12 EDO in only 9 different pitches. I have to be able to do better than that, I would think.

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Amazing Grace - transformation #13

I generally create many versions of a piece, and then listen to find one that has something special. Today's post is the 13th pass through the algorithm, and it has a few new sounds to recommend it.

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Amazing Grace - Transformation #8

I fixed up a few erroneous sustain timings and created a few more versions. This one is take #8, and has a nice busy opening with a Conlon Nancarrow feel to it. That is, it would if Nancarrow had better access to a slide player piano with a whammy bar. The intonation is in 72 equal divisions of the octave. As before, we go through the melody seven times with different levels of variation each time. There are lots of slides from the 7:9:11 to 4:5:6, at various speeds, including slides with pitch vibrato.

I take advantage of some new envelopes I created to enable longer sustain, and even crescendos of piano notes. For example, the normal piano sound has a characteristic waveform that starts loud and gets quickly softer. Here is the waveform of a grand piano played fortissimo on a G at the bottom of the bass clef:

And here is an envlope that will attempt to smooth it out:


And the result, when Csound is told to modify the sample by the chosen envelope:


The result is a note that not only has some serious sustain, but in many cases it will actually crescendo as it sits on the note for a while. The effect is much like that of an electric guitar player using the combination of sustain and feedback to allow a note to grow as it's held.

There are many other possible envelopes that are applied at different times, resulting in sharp attacks and soft ones, depending on the choices available to each note in the piece.

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Amazing Grace - transformed

Today's post is the first "final" version. At this stage I generate multiple passes through the algorithm looking for one that has something special. This one has some nice slides with shakes. Imagine a pair of grand pianos with bottle slides and special sustain pedals that allow the notes to resonate especially long. This version gets fast and slow. It has seven times through the melody, with various levels of alteration along the way.

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Amazing Grace - now with a macro inside a macro

Today's post was made using a new function in my pre-processor, which reads a text file and generates Csound source code. The new function makes it possible to change the name of a macro each time it is called. For example, I've always been able to make a different macros, and call them explicitly by name:

.pian c1v67
.any01-1-a1 d12t42
&pian.&any01-1-a1.

This snippet would produce a line like this:

c1v67d12t42

Which would in turn produce a Csound score line like this:

i1 0 42 67 42

Csound would interpret each parameter as time to start, duration, loudness, pitch, etc. There are parameters for many other note characteristics, but that's enough for this example.

I can call a macro by name, or I can let the preprocessor pick one that meets a "wild card" match. For example:

.pian c1v67
.any01-1-a1 d12t42
.any01-1-a2 d12t3
&pian.&any01-1-a*.

This would either call any01-1-a1 or any01-1-a2, chosen by one randomization method or another. That was the limit to the preprocessor up until today. This meant that I would have to generate choices for all the measures in a hymn transformation. In one case, that was over 60 different sets of possible chords to choose from. The transformation of Now Thank We All Our God had over 8000 lines of source code, all done my hand. It was very tedious, and prone to error if I missed a letter or two. And if I discovered one particularly useful way to manipulate a chord near the end of my composition process, I couldn't retrofit it to all the other measures.

The new method allows me to call a macro and change which one I call using simple indirection. For example:

.pian c1v67
.any01-1-a1 d12t42
.any02-1-a1 d12t3
.num 01
&pian.&any&num.-1-a*.
.num 02
&pian.&any&num.-1-a*.

The macro name is resolved inside out: first &num. is resolved to 01, then &any01-1-a* is resolved to d12t42 or d12t3. With recursion, any number of indirections are possible. Gotta love that 1980's Turbo Pascal compiler.

This allows me to chose a different macro for each chord at execution time, but set up a massive number of variations for all chords, without coding each measure individually. That's a 60:1 savings on code size and tedium. All good.

Today's example is the first five chords of Amazing Grace, repeated seven times. The variation is set to maximum, so there are some strange slips and slides, and trills that your ordinary piano can't do. Mine can. It still sounds like a piano, just one that has some extra mechanical do-dads inside.

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