{"id":673,"date":"2008-05-03T11:04:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-03T11:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/wordpress\/?p=673"},"modified":"2010-01-02T19:54:30","modified_gmt":"2010-01-02T19:54:30","slug":"magnificent-bastards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2008\/05\/magnificent-bastards.html","title":{"rendered":"Magnificent Bastards"},"content":{"rendered":"
23 November 2003:<\/span> I decide to make some music as quickly as possible. I open Scala<\/a>, a program which generates and analyses musical scales, and ic<\/a>, an I Ching simulator Andrew Culver wrote for John Cage.<\/div>\n
In imitation of Warren Burt’s 39 Dissonant Etudes<\/span><\/a>, I decide to make eight one-minute pieces, each using different microtonal equal temperament scales. Equal temperament scales, including today’s standard Western 12-tone scale, have a sort of left-side-of-the-brain organisational logic to them, but otherwise have no harmonic sense. I like the idea of using the sophisticated algorithms of Scala to make obtuse, inelegant scales.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Scala has an on-screen virtual keyboard, which lets you play directly with the scale you’ve just created. Rather than impose any compositional system, I go against my usual musical tendencies and improvise on the virtual keyboard, using the computer keyboard and mouse. The unfamiliar user interface, tuning, and piano keyboard layouts mitigate any musical facility I may have acquired over the years.<\/div>\n
I record 24 improvisations, each one exactly one minute long. Each improvisation is recorded in a single take, without rehearsal or revision. Each improvisation is played in a different scale, ranging from 6 tones per octave to 29 tones per octave.<\/div>\n
For my instruments, I use Gort’s Midget<\/a>, a bank of synthesiser patches which take up a total of just 2 kilobytes of memory. Midget has 12 patches, so I can use each one for two different scales. The choice of which patch to play which sale is decided by ic<\/span>.<\/div>\n
I also use ic<\/span> to select which improvisations should be overdubbed, to create composite pieces. The result is a suite of eight one-minute pieces for one to six instruments, in various clashing tonalities\u2026<\/div>\n

<\/a>
Each mp3 is about half a megabyte of memory.<\/span>
1. Lento<\/a>. | 2. Semplice<\/a>. | 3. Allegro giocoso<\/a>.| 4. Andante mystico<\/a>.| 5. Grave, mesto<\/a>.| 6. Leggiero<\/a>.| 7. Tranquillo<\/a>.| 8. Intensivo<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

23 November 2003: I decide to make some music as quickly as possible. I open Scala, a program which generates and analyses musical scales, and ic, an I Ching simulator Andrew Culver wrote for John Cage. In imitation of Warren Burt’s 39 Dissonant Etudes, I decide to make eight one-minute pieces, each using different microtonal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2701,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions\/2701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}