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.
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Re: Scatterbrained reply:
Date: 2006-02-27 05:23 am (UTC)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.