Humour

Playing with some familiar music

Gesualdo

Some of the most extraordinary music we have with dramatic harmonic shifts:

His life was also rather strange and dramatic.

Monteverdi

Lamento della ninfa from the 8th book of madrigals (performed by La Venexiana):

The text with English translation.

Pitch shifting

G09.pitchshift.pd in the help patches is an implementation of pitch shift with 2 overlapping delays. Miller explains the techniques in his online book. Here is a more detailed explanation, followed (click on next>>) by an implementation of pitchshifting library. You can download this tool and try it for yourself. This is one of the great things about Pd and open source -  it allows anyone to contribute from their own expertise. 

Ravel - Repetition

Ravel's famous Bolero (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra)

Berio

One of the foremost composers of the 20th century. Some recordings available on ubuweb. His folk songs are more then arrangements (and here is Voci a later piece which he subtitled folksongs 2). The series of sequenzas (e.g. viola, guitar) for solo instruments are a fantastic way to learn more about the instruments and imaginative ways to write for them. Coro integrates voices into the orchestra. His Sinfonia, particularly the 3rd movement, was discussed extensively. 

Pd patches

• A repository for Pd with an interactive website, examples patches, and documentation of a variety of project.
•  Pd website includes a section of patches shared by users
• A modular synth build with Pd with some examples. 

Automatic composition

In the words of the author:

"Autocousmatic generates electroacoustic music intended for acousmatic presentation. Based only on a seed directory of source sound files, a desired duration and number of output channels, the program creates multi-channel spectromorphological tape pieces. Audio analysis capabilities are used to discover 'useful' portions of sound files and assess processed files. The project investigates a deeper relation from machine listening to algorithmic composition tasks, and welcomes feedback."

Listen to some of the examples on the website and judge for yourself. And you can read Nick's CMJ article about the system.

Russolo - Noise music

The new instruments designed and built by Russolo -  intonarumori:

And you can hear how they probably sounded. Futurists also used noise machines in combination with other instruments: Macchina Tipografica

Ondes Martenot

One of the early (1928) electric instruments. An introduction about the instrument:

Schoenberg's 'timbre' piece

In his book on harmony Schoenberg remarks that " it must also be possible to make progressions out of tone colours....progressions whose relations with one another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of pitches."
This is often linked to the 3rd of his orchestral pieces:

Henry Cowell

A pioneering and influential American composer. Described as "an inventor of sounds". Some of his short piano pieces are particularly striking:

Endless glissando

This is an illustrated video of a famous auditory illusion:

vowels - formants

A spectral view of different vowels:

film music - learning from the masters

It pays to study the music of the past (only ca. 40 years but that counts as distant past in this era):

Quartal harmony

•  Debussy's 3rd etude 'pour les quartes' 
• Ives The Cage. 
• Also listen to composers such as Bartok, Schoenberg, Hindemith.
• These, in turn, found their way into jazz - such as Bill Evans (with Miles Davies) and others

Bulgarian choral music

Interesting harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic practice growing out of traditional Bulgarian folk Music. Both video and audio sections (for example listen to excerpts from POLEGNALA E TUDORA PILENTSE PEE or VESELI TRANSKI PESNI the later includes an instrumental section). Also some videos:

implicit knowledge of pentatonic scale

Grieg - Lyric Pieces

Construction of melody - elaboration, variation; phrase structure; use of simple harmony;

And the same melody in a different dress (+ unexpected modulation):

Octave scrambled melody

As Diana Deutsch demonstrated, spreading the notes of a melody across different octaves effects our ability to recognise the melody.

Technology project meets counterpoint rules

An interesting set of hardware/software instruments developed as an MA project from NYU based on aspect of Baroque music.