Music programming in javascript
Starting from this tutorial http://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music.html#is-this-for-me
Wow! Great tutorial so far!
Still a great tutorial. Exactly what I'm interested in. Moving on to part 3?
Nah. Headed to the coffee shop. I'll read it there.
What's the one where the music feedbacks into the room?
- More abstract / versatile duration management for Music for Airports
- Multiple instruments
- Chords
"What essentially happened here is that I caused a bug and it made the thing better. When's the last time you remember that happening? Yet this is the kind of thing that often happens when you're playing around with these kinds of musical systems."
As one of Eno's Oblique Strategies cards says, "Honor thy error as a hidden intention".
I’ve met a lot of children who were born listening to one record in particular, which is Discreet Music. I should think by now I’ve met about 60 or 70 kids who came out of the womb listening to that record, which of course, is any marketing department's dream: Get in there right at the beginning, you know?
Discreet Music is very different in the sense that all sounds are electronically produced with a synthesizer – something that was still pretty exotic in the mid-70s. Eno synthesized the music with his EMS Synthi AKS modular analog synthesizer.
The Synthi was Eno's workhorse for much of the 1970s, and it can be heard not only on Eno's own albums but also on many collaborations. It is all over David Bowie's Berlin trilogy, for example. The device had a convenient portable form factor: It was built into a briefcase that you could take with you, kind of like a laptop.
[There's a neat JavaScript emulator of the Synthi too, though it doesn't have the keyboard or the sequencer. https://github.com/AlexNisnevich/synthi-js]
Now, the thing about old analog synthesizers is that they all have distinct sounds. In these machines, sound signals were not treated in the exact digital form as they mostly are today, but were passed along in analog form through all kinds of electronic circuitry. This meant that the signals were subject to various subtle imperfections and disturbances of the physical world, causing each model to have its unique brand of wobble and distortion.
The EMS Synthi is no exception to this. We're not going to be able to emulate exactly what it produces, so we're not going to even try. Instead, we'll settle for something that sounds close enough, for some definition of "close".
http://teropa.info/blog/2017/01/23/terry-rileys-in-c.html
In early 2015 I came across a piece of music that was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. It was called "Africa Express Presents: Terry Riley's In C Mali," which didn't ring any bells for me at the time, though it involved a number of musicians I like, including Brian Eno.
A quick Google search brought me to the Wikipedia article about "In C," which had some phrases in it that really tickled my interest. It talked about the piece consisting of "53 short, numbered, musical phrases" with musicians having "control over which phrase they play" and that each phrase "may be repeated an arbitrary number of times." It sounded more like a description of a process than a description of a musical composition.
In the early 1960s Young started exploring these ideas further in the context of the Theatre of Eternal Music, a collective that Terry Riley was also an occasional member of. The multimedia performances of the Theatre were all about sustained drones, discordance, and feedback – a sound that member John Cale would later integrate into the music of The Velvet Underground.
Young's drone works would reach their logical conclusion in the Dream House sound and light installation, which he has worked on in collaboration with his partner Marian Zazeela since the 1960s. Opened for the public in its current location in Lower Manhattan in 1993, it features custom oscillators that have been producing the same sustained harmonies for several decades. These are notes not just slowed down, but brought to a standstill.
By repeating and overlaying sounds on top of themselves and each other, you could mess with the listener's perception of time and produce aural timelines of pure synthetic construction. Riley's first work that demonstrated this was 1961's Mescalin Mix. It's a tape work made by applying various loop, overdub, and echo effects to human voice, bird sounds, and piano.
Peyote, LSD, and cannabis played an important part in their musical explorations. Young would get the Theatre of Eternal Music "high for every concert." However, this drug use doesn't seem as much recreational as it does instrumental. It was a crucial component to the disruption of time that was a central idea in their music.
A Musical Possibility Space The Open Architecture of "In C"
Another way to look at "In C", then, is that it's really not just a musical composition. It's actually a whole universe of possible musical compositions. Every time it's played, a different piece of music emerges. It has a similar narrative structure every time, but the specifics are always entirely different.
Alvin Lucier