Posted by Dave Dexter on September 25, 2023 at 7:59am
It's not exactly weird, but I used to specialise heavily in retro chiptune-esque and electronica music for games. It's the one part of my skillset and musical approach that I've completely stopped working in - I still would if hired, but to be honest I like the difficulty jump from little bleepy blips to full orchestral Romanticism in a fairly short span of years. This is about as chiptune as it got (and nothing I did was legitimately chiptune, ie created with chips, but based on virtual instruments emulating that broken, crushed sound): https://th1swasatriumph.bandcamp.com/track/a-sea-of-pixelsFor a few years my growing interest and abilities with classical and/or orchestral music worked alongside these chiptune soundtracks, then at some point I blipped my last blap and never looked back. So: anyone else used to do something they completely dropped, whether through distaste, irrelevance or just the dusty hand of time and inopportunity?
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My first home computer was a Commodore 64. I admit, I was a bleeper. But soon I realised it was too early for music production on a computer. I preferred my organ and piano anyway.
"Techno" which I just put in my music area, is about as weird as I can manage. it consists entirely of patches from the Roland JV30 which was my trusty companion for around a decade. Curiously nearly 30 years later, I used the first movement as a basis for my "Concerto for Piano and Ancient Instruments" which uses the same library as Cinderella.
The weirdest music I've ever written is the beginnings of a fugue and another piece in C subminor in 19EDO, i.e., in a tuning where the octave is divided not into 12 but 19 equal steps. Sharps and flats are distinct (so C# and Db are distinct pitches, D# and Eb are distinct, etc.; only B# = Cb and E# = Fb). Minor 3rds in 19EDO are supposed to be closer to the actual minor 3rd in the harmonic series, so supposedly they sound "better" in 19EDO. But major 3rds and perfect 5ths are somewhat flatter than they should be, so there's definitely a "foreign" feel to most of us who have been acclimatized to 12ET tuning.
I haven't exactly abandoned 19EDO writing; I do hope to return to it eventually, but for now, my lack of experience in microtonal writing is holding me back, and my current 19EDO WIPs are, for the time being, shelved. That, and also that almost all existing composition tools assume 12ET (or at most 12 distinct tones per octave), so coaxing e.g. virtual instruments to do 19EDO instead takes extra effort and doesn't always work correctly. What I'd really like to do to get up to speed is to buy a physical 19EDO keyboard, but as yall probably know, those are pretty hard to come by too. :-D
Asking this (of me in particular) is almost too general a question. Where to begin?..
I'll throw out one amusing example, only because I've conducted far too many bizarre experiments to commit to a definitive answer on which were the most peculiar.
The following arose out of a political discussion on the forum, concerning the discovered practice, by nefarious three-letter intelligence agencies, of employing music as a means of torture upon suspected terroristic-combatant detainees. The conversation was proffered by your too-familiar friend Ondib, and I couldn't of course resist the temptation to offer my own implement of torment, in the most grating form of a synthesized first movement symphonic sonata form, complete with the repetative rhythym track as an additional irritant and 'salt on the wound'.
Well, as it turns out, I can't find it, so I'll offer up a similar piece (in the same overtly obnoxious vein), and equally torturous example: pHat 7.0 Triple Fugue of Four Parts
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My first home computer was a Commodore 64. I admit, I was a bleeper. But soon I realised it was too early for music production on a computer. I preferred my organ and piano anyway.
"Techno" which I just put in my music area, is about as weird as I can manage. it consists entirely of patches from the Roland JV30 which was my trusty companion for around a decade. Curiously nearly 30 years later, I used the first movement as a basis for my "Concerto for Piano and Ancient Instruments" which uses the same library as Cinderella.
The weirdest music I've ever written is the beginnings of a fugue and another piece in C subminor in 19EDO, i.e., in a tuning where the octave is divided not into 12 but 19 equal steps. Sharps and flats are distinct (so C# and Db are distinct pitches, D# and Eb are distinct, etc.; only B# = Cb and E# = Fb). Minor 3rds in 19EDO are supposed to be closer to the actual minor 3rd in the harmonic series, so supposedly they sound "better" in 19EDO. But major 3rds and perfect 5ths are somewhat flatter than they should be, so there's definitely a "foreign" feel to most of us who have been acclimatized to 12ET tuning.
I haven't exactly abandoned 19EDO writing; I do hope to return to it eventually, but for now, my lack of experience in microtonal writing is holding me back, and my current 19EDO WIPs are, for the time being, shelved. That, and also that almost all existing composition tools assume 12ET (or at most 12 distinct tones per octave), so coaxing e.g. virtual instruments to do 19EDO instead takes extra effort and doesn't always work correctly. What I'd really like to do to get up to speed is to buy a physical 19EDO keyboard, but as yall probably know, those are pretty hard to come by too. :-D
Asking this (of me in particular) is almost too general a question. Where to begin?..
I'll throw out one amusing example, only because I've conducted far too many bizarre experiments to commit to a definitive answer on which were the most peculiar.
The following arose out of a political discussion on the forum, concerning the discovered practice, by nefarious three-letter intelligence agencies, of employing music as a means of torture upon suspected terroristic-combatant detainees. The conversation was proffered by your too-familiar friend Ondib, and I couldn't of course resist the temptation to offer my own implement of torment, in the most grating form of a synthesized first movement symphonic sonata form, complete with the repetative rhythym track as an additional irritant and 'salt on the wound'.
Well, as it turns out, I can't find it, so I'll offer up a similar piece (in the same overtly obnoxious vein), and equally torturous example: pHat 7.0 Triple Fugue of Four Parts
https://app.box.com/s/jyf9lzwmdkweqlesdfzsulpg0lj64jp6