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marmaduke
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I never recorded anything, but you can find pretty good examples of livecoding on YouTube or Vimeo. The stuff from Andrew Sorenson is pretty worthwhile.
- do you have a sound in your mind that you are trying to create or do you often just stumble upon something that sounds good by accident?
It's somewhere in between the two. If you've ever done any kind of improvisation (cooking, dance, not just musical) you'll understand that it's always a balance between chance and target. With algorithmic composition, for me, it's still mostly chance. There are others who know how to get exactly this or that sound, but I think the best will come when there are those who can improvise anew.
I was interested in the possibilities of algorithmic composition: you can use algorithms to generate patterns of arbitrary complexity, add randomness, vary things mathematically. With real instrumentation, everything that's heard must be played in real time, which can weigh you down if you want to put together many musical ideas at once.
Computer music uses all the same music theory, so that's not just similar but rather identical. I'd predict that when it (computer music) gets its own Mozarts and Beethovens, the musical theory could diverge. I aspired to be such a virtuoso but in end realized that the physical experience of playing an instrument was too important to lose.
Yeah, you only need java and jack. Check it out: https://github.com/overtone/overtone
No it's not at all hard to understand, and I think you understand quite well what I wanted to say.. thanks for the reply!
Recently I started using Overtone (a similar environment for making
music). What struck me the most, from the musician's perspective is,
after playing music on various 'real' instruments for the last .. 18
years, is that the process of composition using code is so so
different:
- on a 'real' instrument, a lot of effort goes into intonation itself,
but on the other hand it is immediate and accessible; with code, you
have to design the sound, knowing what sin oscillator sounds like,
but then you don't have to maintain the intonation in the same way
that is necessary on a 'real' instrument. - eh, for lack of right terms, complex musical elements, like melodies
harmonies, rhythms, feel rather like natural movements (eg. running,
walking, juggling) with a 'real' instrument, but with the same
limitations: you can only run so fast, juggle so many balls. The
code, on the other hand, has the feeling of being unnatural in a way
that is disconcerting (why should I need to type (choose [1 3 7 12])
to express a certain musical idea?) and enabling (I guess you could
call it a musical iron man suit?) in the end, the contrast is similar to that of other domains where the
computer mimics something real that we use (eg. files and folders).