December 2010
1 post
Mutually Recursive Harmony
I had an idea for a new piece of music based loosely on the idea of data caching in computer systems, and on the idea of mutual recursion.
I will spend time formally describing the piece in a future post, but the high-level idea is this:
Emitters. There is a set of ‘emitters’. These are abstract, and could be humans or groups of humans or whatever. An emitter is, abstractly, an...
September 2010
1 post
Nondeterminate
This is a draft of the description I am sending to the Racer Sessions of the piece I am presenting in 2 weeks, on October 3rd.
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The name of the work I am presenting this week is Nondeterminate. Nondeterminate is a piece of music that I wrote in a computer programming language, and that is interpreted and played by a computer, uniquely, every time the program is run. The key idea of this...
August 2010
2 posts
Iannis Xenakis - Pithoprakta
It is as if the guy who runs the record store was reading my blog when he sent out his newsletter today. The New Arrivals list included Iannis Xenakis’ Pithoprakta. This piece, described in more detail here.
The key part of the write up:
Xenakis tried to emulate the behaviour of an ideal gas through the musical equivalent of the kinetic gas theory, assigning to each molecular speed of a...
Non-Deterministic Composition by Program
In my previous post, I described a composition that I made based on a computer simulation of stochastic fluid dynamics. I like the idea of putting patterns in particle interaction (or patterns in data-structure manipulation, depending on your perspective) to work as musical tools. By transliterating from the language of particles/data-structures to the language of sound, a piece of music...
June 2010
1 post
The Sound of Stochastic Fluid Dynamics
This is a composition that I created about 6 months ago, and is derived from my primary occupation as a computer scientist.
As part of my work, I was playing with a scientific computing benchmark that performs a simulation of fluid dynamics. The simulation is a big complicated multi-threaded program, which means there are lots of things all happening at the same time. The program’s...
May 2010
1 post
Static Improvisation
Up to this point, the focus of this blog has been on obtaining other music that I didn’t know anything about, and writing something about it. This was an attempt at two things: 1)Get better at writing about things (and actually having a point, which it is possible I still do not) and 2)Learn about the music by listening to it carefully enough to say something to attempt to make a point.
...
December 2009
2 posts
Sonny Sharrock On Improvisation
I was searching for Sonny Sharrock tabs, and while I couldn’t really find any, I did find this interview with him on the subject of soloing. It’s a little melodramatic, but not without content.
Eddie Gale - Ghetto Music
Eddie Gale is probably best known for playing the trumpet with the Sun Ra Arkestra. He appears not to have had a particularly prolific solo career (based on my cursory search of the web), but Ghetto Music really stands out, not just amongst his other work, but in general.
As a drummer, I consider one of the best features of this album to be Richard Hacket and Thomas Holman’s drumming. ...
October 2009
1 post
Ornette Coleman - Science Fiction (pt. 1?)
It has been a while, while I was away in New York, but I was eager to get back into the swing of things, so the first weekend I was back, I went to the record store and got some new stuff. Along with a sort of mediocre-in-hindsight record by The Fourth Way, I picked up Ornette Coleman’s record Science Fiction.
In 1971, Coleman made this record, more than 10 years after Free Jazz, and more...
April 2009
1 post
Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus
Well, I am suddenly, and officially a big fan of Charles Mingus. Up until tonight, I didn’t really know a lot about his music. I have had a bootlegged digital version of an album of him playing the piano, and a vinyl version of an album of his entitled Three Worlds of Drums. Then, a couple weeks ago I picked up Let My Children Hear Music on vinyl.
I was very impressed by Let My Children...
March 2009
2 posts
Ethiopiques
Not so recently, I watched an excellent movie called Broken Flowers. Bill Murray plays a depressed, aging Don Juan who learns he has a son he didn’t know he had. His apparently rastafarian private eye friend sends him on a journey to connect with his exes to hunt down his son, and his son’s mother. The movie does a great job of making each meeting trick the audience into thinking...
Sonny Rollins
I have been on a serious jazz binge recently, and three artists have really stood out amongst the new listening I’ve been doing.
First, Sonny Rollins. Just browsing the discography on his wikipedia page suggests how prolific a career he has had. There are 39 recordings listed, which were recorded before 1960! And there are as many from 1960 onward. He has of course worked with the...
February 2009
1 post
Hello, World!
Well, this post signifies the “hello, world” moment for this blog. I am not sure what exactly I intend to write about here, but I have a feeling it is going to be a combination of things about music, issues in computer architecture, sitcoms from the 1990s, things I learn about in Brain Class, and anything I come across that I think is interesting. I am going to try to include a note...