Follow @AlgoCompSynth On Twitter!
I’ve been interested in computer-generated music almost as long as I’ve been involved with computers. While computers are commonplace in music today, that wasn’t always the case. A few brave pioneers, like Lejaren Hiller, Iannis Xenakis and David Cope, showed that digital computers could compose music. And a few more brave pioneers, like Max Mathews and Barry Vercoe, made digital computer synthesis of music a reality.
So – AlgoCompSynth – short for Algorithmic Composition and Synthesis of music. That, for the most part, is the kind of music I make. Since 2001, I’ve been mostly working with microtonal music, specifically the 43-tone-to-the-octave scale created by Harry Partch. And the pieces “When Harry Met Iannis (2001)” and “When Harry Met Iannis (2009)” both used the Partch scale and stochastic composition techniques inspired by Xenakis. And both were totally synthetic, created by sfront.
While I certainly don’t believe I’ve exhausted the resources of either Partch in particular or microtonality in general, nor do I believe I’ve exhausted either algorithmic composition or digital synthesis, recent events have changed my musical focus. First of all, I’ve re-discovered jazz, and have met a number of jazz musicians in the Portland, Oregon area. And second, I’ve discovered the works of George Russell, both recorded and written.
In particular, a few weeks ago, I heard Russell’s Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved By Nature. A little web research led me to the fact that Russell had inspired the “modal jazz” revolution pioneered by Miles Davis, and that he had created a theoretical framework called the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. So future works will still be algorithmic, using the LCCTO as a framework, but they will not be microtonal – the LCCTO is based on the conventional 12-tone equal-tempered (12-TET) scale as universally used in “Western” music.
And they will still contain digitally synthesized music, but they will not be exclusively synthetic. The intent is to create music where the computer is part of an ensemble, just as the electronic tape sounds were part of Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved By Nature.
