About that music

[cnoocy]

So last night I posted some music. If you want to try to figure out what it is, read that post, not this one.


Every natural number greater than 1 can be expressed as a unique set of prime factors.
5: 5.
6: 2 3.
672: 2 2 2 2 2 3 7.
If you assign each prime a note, going up the chromatic scale, and for each number, play its prime factorization in ascending sequence within a single beat, the clips I posted are 2-97 and 300-397.

I had this idea 3 years ago or so, and have just now gotten it working with some help from rikchik and some folks from the secret project down the way. It's a neat sound, though I feel like there's more to do with it. It might be interesting to do something different with the primes, to emphasize the lyrical quality of the composites. I'll need to think about that, but I'd be very interested in suggestions.

Here's the sequence from 2 to 397.

Comments

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

Glad I could help.

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

I got as far as it being based on a mathematical sequence and having a mechanism for both note duration and pitch, but not volume, but didn't get farther than that. What's your starting pitch? By the end of the sequence, the notes are clearly way too high, but they're less too high than I would have guessed based on the description.

Some modern music shares some elements with your sequence, but by itself this comes off as more the basis for a piece of music than something finished.

Have you considered chords instead of individual notes? For 6, rather than playing the pitches for 2 and 3 sequentially, you could play them both at the same time.

Scatterbrained reply:

[cnoocy]

The problem with chords is that it's rare not to be playing two notes that are a half-step apart, since each successive prime is one half-step higher. I agree that this is unfinished.
Here's two experiments:
Primes as rests and
Primes skipped altogether.

What do you think of making 2 the highest note and going down for successive primes?
I do like the idea of chords, but I'm not sure where to get other values. Though I could do something specific for the first few factors. Hmm...

Re: Scatterbrained reply:

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

You can learn to love tone clusters. Alternatively, you can assign pitches with an ear towards chords. If you assign 2 to C, 3 to E, and 5 to G, that will keep you covered most of the time regardless of how you assign the other pitches.
Also, just going diatonic (white key only) instead of chromatic would significantly reduce the crunchiness of the chords.

One thing I like about starting at the bottom and going up is the constant repetition of 2 gives it a home pitch to keep returning to. I'm not sure starting high and descending would give that same sense of a home pitch, especially if your starting pitch is too high and squeaky.

If you want to be really crazy you can try randomly assigning pitches. Say, the first twelve primes are randomly assigned to the twelve notes in one octave. If you want some logic to it you can use the same sequence of pitches an octave up for the next twelve pitches, or you could choose a new ordering, selected randomly or based on a transformation of the initial sequence. Or you could just randomly assign the 88 keys on the piano to the first 88 primes and end up with a pointilist splatter of pitches.

I am far from an expert on 12-tone music, but there are some compositional techniques that you could experiment with.

I find myself thinking about ways to generate rhythm and dynamics, but they all require introducing additional sequences of numbers, and I don't know if that's a step you want to take.

Re: Scatterbrained reply:

[cnoocy]

I don't have anything against introducing more number sequences per se. I'd been thinking of using some for chords. It would be nice if they were also based in number theory. And I will try some of those ideas (and read up a bit of 12-tone music!)

Re: Scatterbrained reply:

[cnoocy]

I ended up taking a lot of your suggestions. Thanks.

max

[(Anonymous)]

Do you know Max/MSP?
It's a good environment for such experiences.

greetings:

erno"