Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Orbifolds in music

For Wednesday November 1, please check out the following article from the journal Science:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5783/72

And you can find more background info at Dmitri Tymoczko's homepage:

http://www.music.princeton.edu/~dmitri/

Including animations (made with Max/MSP/Jitter) of Chopin's e minor prelude, mapped in several different dimensions.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

How to turn in your project

Turn your project in any way you can. For example, you can put everything in a folder, and then make a zip archive, and mail us the zip archive. To make a zip archive on a mac, highlight the folder, then do to File -> Create Archive. In unix, at the command line, type tar -czf myproject.tgz myproject to make an archive of a folder called myproject. Sorry, I don't know what to do on a MS-based computer.

Or, you can put the folder or files in the public area of your netfiles, and tell us how to find it.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Thousands of tuning systems!

Here is a folder of Max patches containing Victor Cerullo's microtuner object, which stores and plays tuning systems in the .mtx format. Included is an archive of thousands of different tuning systems, which boggle the mind.

Also included is a midi file player (the detonate object) and a few midi files to get you started, with Bach and Stevie Wonder; for now, playback is on a sketchy FM synth.

Please experiment with a variety of songs in different tunings, to get an idea of how the different tuning systems sound.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Monday, October 15, 2007

Projects

I met with a number of you in the last week or so to discuss your projects. I still need to meet with some of you though: let's make sure we get that arranged by the end of today's class. Remember these projects are due Wednesday Octobe 24.

This week I propose we continue to look at scales, chapters 5 and 6 of Benson. For Wednesday (so everyone has time to prepare), I'd particularly like to experiment with the claims in 5.11, about "classical harmony" and its relationship to various scales. So have a look at that section. And, let's see what Steve suggests.

Monday, October 8, 2007

Pythagorean tuning

Here's a Max patch to try out for Pythagorean tuning. It uses the poly~ object, which you can read about in MSP tutorial 21.