Music Plagiarism

Compare (from 3:50)

to (from 1:20)

Did it cross the line from inspiration to simple plagiarism? All the musical elements are borrowed/stolen with some rearrangement. 

Leitmotifs

A useful sorting of the motifs in Wagner's Ring cycle with notation and synthesised audio. And a vidoe playlist of the same

from notation to music

The internet is a wonderful thing:

Too often we talk about the score when we mean the music. 

Music 'similarity'

I recently discovered that, as an artist, I am 100% similar to the following:

• Humair, Ducret, Chevillon + Eskelin
• Muhal Richard Abrams & Roscoe Mitchell 
• The Fonda / Stevens Group
• Jean-François Bovard Et La Compagnie d'Eustache 

And that the genres I'm working in are Juma, Gammarec, and freepurp1e. Now I have to find out what those are...

The conductor's work

Machine Learning Systems in Concert

My partner in crime (Dr. Bob Sturm) and I recently hosted a concert of music co-created with computers. The concert ended with the first performance of my piece Bastard Tunes:

Read about the composition process of this piece and about the research that went into creating the system.

'Folk' Tune 'Arrangements'

Standing on the shoulders of giants such as Bartok or Berio, I recently finished writing an ensemble piece titled Bastard Tunes. The piece was composed with the help of a machine learning system trained on transcriptions of Celtic music. The system produces short melodies that share many characteristics with the style it learned. But, with the possible exception of the fourth Bastard Tune, my piece applies more freedom in the way the system's output is used as compositional material. The piece will be premiered in a concert with other examples of music composed by and with computers.

Rhythmic Placing

Listening to the snare drum in the quieter bits in this recording (e.g. around 20 sec. in):

This is not sloppy playing, but a deliberate, and fascinating, offset. We all too often forget these kind of nuances - things that happen in-between the beats and that are difficult to capture and analyse.

Electronic Music - not so very new

120years.net provides a wealth of information on developments in electronic music. 

"The focus of this project is in exploring the main themes of electronic instrument design and development previous to 1970 (and therefore isn’t intended as an exhaustive list of recent commercial synthesisers or software packages.) As well as creating a free, encyclopaedic, pedagogical resource on the History of Electronic Music"

Purcell What power art thou

The chromatic motion is in the vocal line combined with the pulse to a unique result:

Johannes, Robert and Clara

Tamás Vásáry manages to capture the intimate nature of this music:

Minimal music

But a totally different kind of minimal:

(Thanks to EnsembleXY for introducing me to this piece)

Percussion instruments

Here are some examples of (mostly) unpitched percussion instruments. And here is a list of some of the more common used unpitched percussions.

Is there no musical repetition here

While there are no note-pattern repetitions in here, when listening to this - as music - I hear repeated ideas. An appoggiatura (short-long) motif is heard multiple times, as is the upward motion through the keyboard.
This is a neat illustration of the problem of identifying music with its notation. Equating music with a sequence of note onsets, because this is how it looks on the page.

Music-Sound-Design

Blurring the lines between sound design and music, between diegetic and non:

Old and older

Recorded at the cathedral where it was first performed, this performance highlights the spatial dimension of the music (a topical subject but we sometimes forget the long history of sound disposition in spaces):

The string writing is, of course, very effective (score from imslp).

Bartok - Bagatelles Op. 6

These short piano pieces are wonderful sources for examining innovative harmony (and rhythm, and composition technique, and ...)

Granados - Goyescas

A recording of Granados performing his own music (in 1916 remastered from piano rolls):

Simple Metric Modulation

A drum tutorial explaining metric modulation (with notated illustrations as a bonus):

Correlation =/= causation

A useful illustration that if you search wide enough you can easily find 2 highly correlated variables:

 But that does not mean there is causal relations between them