I have some new equipment on the way. I ordered a long power strip that has the openings aligned and spaced better. Right now the pile of the cables and cords looks like a nest of snakes. I also ordered a rolling cart…
to put the Korg Karma on. That thing weighs a ton. With a cart I can roll it to where I need it — ex. to connect it to my computer and record the sounds using Audacity.
Here’s a great description of the beast. I got this one around 2003.
Another piece of equipment I have on the way is a new pair of glasses. I have been avoiding bifocals for 10 years, but because of my upcoming classes I decided it was important to be able to see things distant and close without sliding my glasses up and down my nose (which is what I do currently). The new glasses are “progressives”, which means there is a continuous gradation of focal lengths. My husband says that he likes his; you just have to tilt your chin up and down to find the right area for what you want to do. Another friend said that hers made her nauseated at first. Walking up stairs was especially freaky.
Earlier this summer I went on a trip to Florida and we took a charter boat to go snorkeling. I am very nearsighted (can’t see the E on the eye chart) and would not have been able to see any fish unless they were close enough to bite me. So I took apart one of my old pairs of glasses and super-glued the lenses into the scuba mask. That is how I’m picturing these new progressive glasses. A scuba mask for classes and reading music.
I made good progress setting my keyboards up yesterday. Earlier this year we had all our aviary birds living in my office (the Green Room) while we made renovations in the aviary (a remodeled garage). When I brought the birds in, I packed away all my instruments, cables, power cords, user’s guides, music interface, etc. We moved the birds back out to the aviary in June and the Green Room was cleaned up and ready for our house-sitters to use. But I didn’t unpack the boxes of music equipment til now.
I tried connecting the Fatar 88 key controller to my newest Korg, the Microarranger. This has a wonderful array of patches and “band in a box” type accompaniment settings, and so lightweight you can sit it on your lap, but has very small keys.
When I connected them, sound came out, but I was unable to change the patch. No matter how I manipulated the Microarranger, midi signals from the Fatar only produced sounds from the piano patch. However if I played the Microarranger directly, the different patches were available as usual. This is annoying, but not a big deal. I guess I don’t have the midi input set up properly on the Microarranger.
Next I connected the Fatar to my oldest Korg, a little sound module called the 05R/W.
It is a half-size rackmount and we purchased this (and the Fatar) with money we received after my husband’s mom passed away. This was right after I graduated from college (1995) but before my son was born. When I plugged it in and turned everything on, the sounds took me back 23 years.
Octaves and 5ths are primal intervals, natural to ancient music. The use of the third became prominent in the Renaissance and with composers such as Palestrina in the 1500s. Bach and his contemporaries began to exploit the 7th in the 16th and 17th centuries. The 9th didn’t become an important chord tone until the time of Wagner in the mid 19th Century, and the extended tones of #11 and 13th weren’t commonly accepted until the music of early 20th century composers like Debussy and Stravinsky.
The Wiki article is much more complex — it talks about how the harmonics that are integer divisions of the original string (or column of air) are different from the tuning system we use now (equal temperament). The little numbers above the notes indicate how many cents sharp or flat the integer harmonics are from modern tuning.
I remember Dr. Greenberg talking about Pythagoras (and his students) experimenting with a monochord and finding the ratios for octaves, perfect fifths, perfect fourths, and major and minor thirds. The Wiki article takes it further.
Yow. I wonder if this has applications to music that uses microtonal scales.
My first day of classes at HCC is on August 27, about 2 weeks from now. I spent time today getting more things set up in my office. I thought of a clever way of displaying my bamboo and PVC flutes that will keep them right at hand and easy to pick up. They are such great instruments to improvise with. I also love my blackwood flutes, but they are very expensive and live in a special cabinet with controlled humidity. Taking them out, applying cork grease, assembling them, then carefully drying them afterward is an involved process. I also have a student model Boehm flute, but I don’t think it’s ‘healthy’ for it to be sitting out all the time either. So it’s great to have the bamboo flutes. Both of mine are by Olwell — a small one in G and a large one in C. I also have a black PVC flute that was made in Ireland, in the traditional key of D.
My blackwood flutes were made by David Copley. There is one headpiece and two bodies. One body is the traditional keyless flute in the key of D; the other is a fully-keyed flute in C. Unfortunately the material under the keys has broken down (eaten by dermestid beetles?) and the keys don’t seal. I need to send the flute back to meet its Maker!
I still have to set up the “piano” in my office. I have an 88 key, weighted keyboard that is more than 20 yrs old. It’s a bit stiff and squeaky but functional. There’s several sound sources I could connect it to using midi cables. The original is a rack mount Korg 05R/W (also 20+ yrs old!). Other options are the Korg Karma and Korg Microarranger.
I also need to clear the random boxes out of here so that I can sit at the piano without tripping on things!
I just watched this video and was inspired! Margaret Fabrizio talks about how there is a difference between “decoding” and “reading”. She acted out what it was like to be a first grade student trying to read A Tale of Two Cities. “I..I..It..w..wa..was..the..be, be, best of tims, tim-es, times”. This brought back memories of what it was like when I took organ lessons in junior high and high school. The organ came with a box of graded sheet music that started with Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and continued through folk songs and popular music. After teaching chords in the left hand in a standard position and teaching the pedals for the bass notes, it went on to have the chord symbols written over the melody staff. I stopped reading the left hand and depended on the chord symbols. I still suffered through decoding the right hand, but after stumbling through the melody several times I would have it memorized and after that could play it by ear. I can still remember bumbling my way through some of these old songs and suddenly my parents would figure out what I was trying to play and would start singing. One time it was “Casey would waltz with a strawberry blond”…
…except that my dad changed the lyrics to “Casey was hit with a bucket of sh–” (Mom interrupts “Larry! Larry!!”)…”and the band played on”.
When I reached highschool my mom found a new organ teacher, a young woman just out of college. She was very theoretical and taught me to play from fake books — how to do blocked chords and a walking bassline. She also finally figured out that I couldn’t really read! We agreed that I would also work on some very simple music along with arranging tunes from the fake books. I made some progress and have many good memories of working with her. She invited me to Wanamaker’s department store to see the famous organ there (the young man who was her boyfriend at the time was the organist, and he chatted with her while the music roared away, both hands and feet flying). She also invited me to her house. One whole room of the house was built around a pipe organ. She let me try it out. While I was playing, a key got stuck, so we went into the back room where many of the pipes and gadgetry was. It was a small Vox Humana pipe going “neeeeeeee”.
I stopped taking lessons my senior year. I wish I had kept going! But I was wrapped up in playing Cat Stevens on the guitar, and also taking calculus and physics. I was also in the choir. Choir was amazing (we learned the Faure Requiem and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms) but again that was by memorization.
I did not take part in any form of music during the intervening years. I didn’t get back to music until I had turned 30 and was an undergraduate (in entomology!). My husband (a graduate student at the time) had the urge to have something piano-like in the house and we got our first synthesizer. I was frustrated with my inability to play from sheet music, and my husband, a computer guy, suggested that there was probably software that would help. We did not find software that helped with sight reading, but we did find software that would let you play music into the computer and then edit it, the way you could edit an essay in Word. The notes took the form of little rectangles of varying lengths, arranged with high notes at the top and low notes at the bottom — like the roll from a player piano. This is called sequencing software. With the help of the sequencing software I found that I could compose by ear. This was a life-changing discovery. When I was supposed to be working on my senior year classes I also created a little album of music (recording it on cassette tapes), drew album art and gave copies to all my friends.
When we moved to Maryland I joined a church and have been a member of the choir there for about 15 years. Our choir director is the sort of person who encourages you to stretch out of your comfort zone. She makes this possible by creating a supportive environment — building a sense of trust among the choir members. It’s OK to make mistakes. I have often had the experience of being the only alto at rehearsal and having to sight read new music . And it’s totally OK.
Now I am in my 60s and I have an opportunity to devote a lot of time to music. As someone who’s been musically…illiterate? for many years, I’m excited to see what progress I can make!
I would be thrilled to someday be able to play something like this!
Dr. Greenberg defines music as “sound in time” or “time ordered by sound” — basing this on an earlier definition that included the word “purposeful”. Interesting that Greenberg took “purposeful” out.
The first unit of the course will be about the timbre of different instruments.
He begins by talking about the major classifications of instruments. The first instrument, he said, is the human voice; he won’t go on to discuss it, except to say that other instruments aspire to have its flexibility and expressiveness.
As a potential composer, that made me think about how the timbre of different instruments might remind the listener of different kinds of human voices. Childlike, wheezy-old, raging, crooning, howling at the moon. What kind of person is speaking in this composition? Do they have “friends” with them? Or an argumentative crowd?
“Anthromorphizing” the instrumentation.
Also in this lecture he talks about the bassoon and the contrabassoon; he asks “was there ever an instrument simply called the ‘oon’ ?” Unfortunately no, although at one time there was a tenoroon.
Back in 2010, my son started attending a private high school which was 45 minutes away. This meant that frequently I was in the car about 3 hrs a day, 5 days a week. I found a great way of taking advantage of the driving time: listening to lectures from The Teaching Company. My favorite instructor was Dr. Robert Greenberg and over the span of 4 years I acquired and listened to many of his courses.
Since I’ll be taking classes at Howard Community College this fall, I thought it might be good to return to my Robert Greenberg lectures; I can listen to them while doing the dishes, cooking, etc.
Today I started with Understanding the Fundamentals of Music. This is a relatively short course, with just 16 lectures (unlike his very long music history course, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music). The main things I remember from this course were: him telling a funny story about his wife (a piccolo player), making fun of oboeists (the high pressure affects their brains?); examples of solos that each instrument might dream of (ex. bassoon in the beginning of Stravinsksy’s Rite of Spring?), songs with strange meters like “Take Five”, and a very thorough discussion of tonic and dominant chords. I think he actually goes into the Greek experiment with the string and the proportions (Pythagorus?). Good stuff. Lecture 1 today!
On July 24th I was waiting to see what happened when the No Man’s Sky universe was re-written. I had heard that the change would come at 9 am, so at 10 am I checked in. My beautiful home planet was still there! The graphics seemed more detailed, and there was more lag than usual, but that stormy golden world of Tempus Fugit continued to exist. I have to admit I was a tiny bit disappointed. How can you write an epic song cycle about THE LAST OF THE 300 WORLDS when they didn’t actually end?
On the other hand, I wasn’t quite sure “this was it”. After all, the universe rewrite was a new patch to the game, and those usually take longer to upload. I logged out of the game and started looking on the forums. There’s an active Reddit dedicated to No Man’s Sky. I found out, no, the patch had not yet been released. I was on pins and needles and kept checking back. Finally someone posted on Reddit that it was here — about 2 pm. At 3 I logged on to Steam and clicked on “No Man’s Sky”. There was in fact an update and it took about 45 minutes to download. I had promised myself that I would not get caught up playing the new version of the game (called “Next”), but I did want to see what the new world looked like. I clicked “play” and watched the loading screen, which I have seen so many times before — stars coming into view in the distance, drawing near and streaming past. The star-stream ended with white fog, which cleared to reveal….I’m no longer on Tempus Fugit. I’m on a space station. My ship has changed — it’s full of obsolete technology — and it runs on different fuel now. The star system has the same name as before, but I didn’t dare fly down to explore the planets for fear of running out of “gas”. The space station was much more extensive, with all kinds of aliens walking around instead of the usual half a dozen guys sitting around a table playing cards. In fact the new, improved space station reminded me a little of the space station in Mass Effect called The Citadel.
Meanwhile, the game went on sale and I got copies for several of my young friends. I’m hoping they will get started exploring this new universe and that later I can tag along with them. “What do we use for fuel now? How do I build a base? How do we do multiplayer?” etc. They seem to pick these things up much more quickly than I do.
In conclusion
It did happen! The universe changed. I can write The Last of the 300 Worlds, rather than My Home Planet Has Better Graphics Now.
I have spent many hours in the procedurally generated universe of No Man’s Sky. I’ve spent so much time there it’s almost like having spent a month traveling around the US. Like seriously, I’ve logged more than 300 hrs. Kinda scary when you think about it. I’ve filled a terabyte of space on my disk drive with screen capture videos.
About 6 months ago there was a major update. When this happened there were many improvements. However, the update re-wrote the entire universe. My home planet was burned to a cinder; Dawnseas no longer has an ocean, Etienne Rouge is no longer red. Only a few of the planets that I had discovered, named and loved have remained as before. I’m embarrassed to admit, I cried when I saw what had happened to my home world. It’s only pixels. But…I will never be able to go there again!
As of July 24, 2018 there will be a huge update. Rumor has it that there will be a form of multiplayer and even PvP. But I’m pretty sure that the universe will be rewritten from scratch. That means I have only a short while to record footage of my favorite planets.
It also means that when that universe is gone, it is gone. That chapter of the story will close. I will have a finite amount of video footage to draw from. This puts limitations on the project (a good thing) and also gives it an overarching emotional theme. Goodbye Dawnseas, Rosperigosa, Neochadwickia. Goodbye Naguxoisanorca.
OK, so if I’m going to do an independent project totally on my own, I can take it in the exact direction I want rather than trying to meet someone else’s standards. Which is kind of a shame, because trying to meet standards & goals outside of my comfort zone could be a really good thing.
The main thing I’m interested in now is music for video games and for other virtual environments (ex. background music for a virtual tour of an architectural building still in the planning phase). One of the different things about this kind of composition is the use of “stems”. You submit not only the finished piece but also its building blocks (the bass line, the melody line, the weird sci-fi sound effects line) which can be used by the game designer at will — like toppings on a pizza. Here layer parts one, two and three; here just one, here pile them all on.
In game design this is important because the software can be programmed to react to what the player is doing and increase the intensity of the music by using more of the stems layered together. (“Player approaches monster, is attacked and retreats; cue ‘Run Like Hell’ theme”.)
I have been working on my own, posting videos on Youtube. Eight of the videos take place in the planet exploration game of “No Man’s Sky”. It would be a great project to write some additional music to capture the mood of these planetary environments, and also take the compositions I’ve already written and work with them; break them down into stems, put them in official music notation. This will be a lot of work because when I mixed the songs last year I blended all the parts — I don’t have the individual stems anymore! I’ll have to re-create them. Also, I dread working with Finale. I have done it but believe me I would much rather eat kale. Raw kale. Tough raw kale. Kale doesn’t make me beat my head on the desk.
Another project I’ve started (but haven’t posted any examples of yet) are videos that take place in the medieval fantasy world of “Dark Souls”. For these I would like to use music from the repertoire but arranged for synth (by synth I mean any electronic reproduction of instrument sounds, including the realistic samples used in Garritan Instant Orchestra). One song is based on a MIDI file of Machaut’s “Rose, Liz, Printemps, Verdure”. I used a different instrument for each voice part and used dynamics to bring one instrument to the foreground, then take it back and bring another forward. This comes under “arrangement” rather than “composition” but it’s also something I want to learn about.
So here we go.
Take notes on Emily Reese’s “Top Score” series. React to them.
COMPOSE more music — for the sci-fi world of No Man’s Sky
Take already composed music and make stems and scores
ARRANGE music for the fantasy world of Dark Souls
Read Winifred Phillip’s book A Composer’s Guide to Game Music
