• I begin a composition with a musical idea. Loosely following the classical tradition, my idea might be a motif, which is to say a small, distinguishable musical figure that shall serve as a building block for further musical material. This could be one of three things: an abstract rhythmic pattern, an abstract sequence of tones (i.e., a melody), or the two conjoined together (i.e. a melody with rhythm).
• Fundamental to the notion of a motif is the very notion of repetition, which we may characterize as the reappearance of some musical happening after some passage of time. Here, “musical happening” denotes the simple concept of something audible within a musical composition. (This includes timbre, rhythm, harmony, volume, and any other method of varying sound that can serve in a musical context.) To expand upon an earlier definition, we now say that a motif is the repetition of a musically significant abstract aural pattern. (What, then, is “musical significance”? Here I must stop presenting definitions and defer to a sort of intuitive musical understanding, the likes of which is possessed by most people in some form or another. Musicians are apt to have a more solid grasp on this slippery notion than non-musicians, but I expect anyone who can appreciate music can make reasonable guesses that roughly approach what a more learned theorist might say.)
• A musical phrase is a group of contiguous musical happenings that together seem to form some kind of encapsulated unit. (Again I must hide behind a vague sort of “musical intuition”. There is no rigorous, objective way to identify a phrase that I am aware of; some element of intuitive understanding must enter into the picture.) Most of the time, musical phrases consist of manipulated melodic and rhythmic motifs.
• A theme is a phrase or collection of phrases that are integral to to a piece of music’s identity.
• Motifs, phrases, and themes may all be manipulated at different levels, though of course manipulating the more fundamental elements of a theme will necessarily change the theme as well. (Themes supervene on motifs and phrases, within reason.)
• That brings us to the subject of manipulation. In what ways can we manipulate musical “objects”?
• Repetition – this is analogous to the identity operator in mathematics. Repetition is, unsurprisingly, what you get when you repeat something with no important variation.
• Under literal repetition, everything remains invariant.
• Transposition – a melody may be transposed by identifying the ratios of frequencies between notes, beginning with the first note (or any other point of reference) and comparing from there. (This is the same thing as identifying intervalic relations between pitches.) One then recreates those ratios with respect to a new, different first note.
• Under transposition, the ratios between frequencies (i.e., the intervals between pitches) alone remains invariant; all other musical attributes can change.
• Typically, music theoreticians draw a distinction between chromatic transpositions, which are precisely as described above, and diatonic transpositions, which are as above but with modifications to allow the transposed material to stay true to its original key.
• Tempo change – augmentation or diminution, i.e., the slowing or speeding of a rhythm, typically in accordance with a simple beat division (e.g., doubling, halving, quadrupling, or quartering a motif’s tempo).
• A change of tempo requires that the temporal intervals be proportionally preserved. Thus, if a rhythm contains two quarter notes and one half note, the essential element which must remain invariant is that of two pulses followed by another pulse which is itself twice as long.
• Tempo can also change continuously, as opposed to discretely, as during an accelerando or ritardando. In this case, the proportions of time that elapse between pulses themselves change; so, we still calculate the intervals between pulses in accordance with the original proportions, but they are now multiplied by some factor(s) which scales them over time.
• Timbral variation, volume (“dynamics”) variation – the above principles apply for these two methods of altering sound as well; but, traditionally, Western music has not given as much prominence to these attributes, structurally speaking. (I am lumping instrumentation changes – e.g. from a vibraphone to a string quartet – under timbral variation as well.)
• Other variation – this is the “catchall” of manipulation. Anything that doesn’t fit easily into the above categories fits here, such as raising or lowering one pitch while disregarding the rest (instead of having them all follow suit identically, as they would for transposition), adding or removing notes altogether, modifying rhythms in an erratic way, etc. Here, we can’t give a basic rule about which elements remains invariant, since the invariant elements differ on a case by case basis.
• We note that there must be something that remains invariant, however, in order for a motif, phrase, or theme to remain recognizable. If there is nothing that remains invariant between two phrases, discounting less distinctive attributes like timbre, there is no reason to consider the two phrases separate instances of the same phrase at all. (A motif might change subtly over time, to the point when you look at it later, and see that it bears no similarities to its original form, but it still felt like the same motif all along – much like the Ship of Theseus. I don’t think this special case need concern us here, however.)

My sample collage-style compositions have mostly gone to the wayside, at least for now. Actually, over the last several months I haven’t been doing a lot of composition of any sort, period: more often, I’ve been improving my piano skills and working on programming projects. Last month, however, I was pretty excited by things like the prospect of algorithmic compositions that incorporated elements from things like cellular automata and the sonification of scientific data. I set up foundations for doing both things using the open source environment Pure Data, but I apparently lost interest when it came time to actually do anything creative with them. (I did also start writing a post regarding sonification to put here, but that obviously never happened.)

It’s kind of frustrating, actually. It’s been about two years since I first started on some of those sample-based pieces, and I still lack enough that I’d call “complete” to put in an album. (Unless it was a small album.) This may not be revolutionary music, but it’s still something that I think some groups of people would appreciate, so it would be kind of nice to get it out to them. I guess that’s always the struggle of musicians and artists: getting your work out so that people will encounter it. Performing and touring is probably the best strategy for music; but I’ve never been all that big on performance in the first place. (For that matter, I still haven’t worked out the logistics of what I’d even be doing during a performance. Pushing “Play” and standing back isn’t an acceptable answer.)

So it goes.

Some thoughts on the matter:

Patience is the passive sibling of persistence. In the first, you endure by maintaining some current state in spite of an untoward environment (a la homeostasis, negative feedback). You “resist” change. In the second, you exert yourself to effect a new state which the “rest of the system”–the parts that aren’t you–impedes. (We could say the external environment resists you, but sometimes your struggle is with yourself–especially if you’re me–so the restricting forces aren’t necessarily outside of you, per se.) Patience holds something still or constant while surrounding forces try to change; persistence changes something while surrounding forces try to keep it constant.

On a side note, people usually say “patience” only when enduring harmless  (benign) conditions, where there is little threat to your system’s integrity. Waiting in the dentist’s reception room doesn’t really hurt you, the  challenge is instead simply to stay there faithfully without wandering off  and shirking your appointment. (Preferably without becoming frustrated or  flustered as well.) And so we say that the wait requires patience. When the  dentist begins poking sharp, unfamiliar, and terrifying things into your mouth, however, then we might say making it to the end requires less patience and more endurance (or fortitude, strength of will, etc.). For simplicity’s sake, I  shall choose endurance as the broader concept under which to subsume patience.

Endurance and persistence need not be mutually exclusive; and which is applied where depends on your perspective. We can say that Atlas must persist in holding up the world, an activity which surely requires an inconceivable amount of effort: he wages war with gravity, which “wants” the Earth to be pulled to the ground.* In this sense, he is a component of a system which strives to upset the state of its surrounding environment: he perseveres against the world’s resistance. On the other hand, however, we can think of Atlas’s current state, where he holds up the world, as the constant state that he tries to maintain by resisting the Earth’s antagonistic efforts to disrupt that state.

Ultimately, it is about equilibrium, A.K.A. stability. All systems seek a point of equilibrium.** Endurance or persistence (or whatever you happen to be talking about) comes into play (1) when two sets of forces, broadly construed, come into conflict with one another; and (2) when we can assign “purpose” to one of those sets. Endurance and perseverance are qualities that partially describe an individual’s psychological character when she resists the environment or imposes change upon it.

Oh, and it’s in 5/4. That’s probably an impediment for most rappers, sorry. I did try making a 4/4 version, but the groove gets completely ruined, trust me.

Aggrandizement

Released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. (Which means, do whatever you want with it, just give me some credit plzkthx.)

Incidentally, this marks the first YouTube upload on my Clockwork Paradigm account (as opposed to the “Collagenre” one).

Thus: Devo & Willow Smith – Whip It! (Back and Forth) Mash-up

Available for download yonder: http://www.mediafire.com/?r6ugzkb7y1703xs

You can download the end result of the track here as an MP3 or a FLAC file.

Incidentally, this seems as good a time as any to mention that I’ve settled on the name “Clockwork Paradigm” for future sample-related projects.

To help you out with your stalkerly ways, let me provide you a link to a blog about the experience that I will be maintaining:

http://incurably-inscrutable.blogspot.com/

Wooo!

Music-making is being put on hold for a while while I get settled and used to everything. But I did bring all of my projects-in-progress, though it will be slightly irritating to work with some of them now. (The paths for all of the audio files they use will need to be changed, and my laptop isn’t quite as awesome as my desktop vis-a-vis performance.)

I have to agree with one of the commenters’ reply: “you have transcended and overcome pretense.” As time goes on, I get more and more irritated with people who hate on pop music irrationally. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to dislike, but I think there are far too many elitists who carry this to an extreme: people who simply won’t even give something a chance if it’s a top-40 hit.

“Serious” music artists–and here I’m including those in the rest of the pseudo-mainstream, possibly “intellectual” world, such as jazz musicians, singer/songwriters, indie rockers, prog rockers, IDM producers–are often asked, in interviews, if they have any musical “guilty pleasures”. Perhaps we should stop to examine why some type of music might be embarrassing to listen to. The broader question is, do we ever have a reason to feel ashamed for liking the things we like?

There are moral issues where the answer may be yes, but I can’t even begin to address that topic here. When we stick to talking about media, food, entertainment, theater, art, and music, however, I don’t see what good it does anyone to be prejudicially, unreasonably scornful; nor do I think any person should feel ashamed to admit that s/he enjoys one of these items, even if it is “low-brow” or what-have-you. (That is, assuming no moral conflicts again; certain media may be objectionable due to how it is created or acquired.)

So, I applaud Eric Whitacre for his tastes; and I moreover applaud his willingness to share that with the rest of the world, even knowing that many of his fans surely are of the ardently elite variety. Kudos!

Work on my collage/mash-up material progresses, but it is very slow still, because I have unfortunate difficulties staying motivated on music that I’m sick of. But I’ve not yet given up entirely!

In the meantime, I also started writing some pop rock-ish songs that I may try to pitch to whoever might pay money for them. It’s kind of an experiment to see if I can write the stuff, also partly a cynical attempt to see if I have what it takes to make any income off of this route, pretty much through blatant selling out. But hey, we’ll see; odds are it won’t go anywhere.

Cheers!

The second item of interest if a short-story I came across somewhere or other, entitled Melancholy Elephants, by Spider Robinson. Set several centuries (or was it millennia? I forget) in the future, we witness as a lobbyist struggle to convince a senator that a new copyright-extension bill must not pass. We learn that, at this point in time, copyright has become very carefully policed, and it is now very difficult for artists to create original work at all because so much has already been created and meticulously noted in the government’s database.

Our protagonist focuses on this key point: there is necessarily a finite number of sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes that can possibly be aesthetically pleasing to humans. At some point, supposing the species lasts long enough, we will quite simply run out of new possibilities that have never been created before. And when that happens, if the copyright still applies to all of the old material, there will be nothing left to create.

It’s a fascinating point, though I do wonder about whether such limits, finite though they are, might still be large enough that they could not even be exhausted by the time the sun has burnt out. Or, by the time the universe collapses–or whatever will inevitably happen to stifle all human life. (Omnipresent heat-death, perhaps.) Sometime I may calculate a rough estimate of the maximum number of recognizable and possibly appealing “songs” or “distinct pieces of music”, difficult though it is to decide conclusively where to the draw the line; I am pretty convinced that it would still take an absurdly long time to exhaust those combinations; especially considering the fact that we are constrained by human composers and  their speed of composition, along with the fact that, in practice, we would have to listen to one of these pieces at least once, presumably, to judge whether it’s a “new” piece or not.

Anyway, yeah.