Compositional Algorithms

Monday, May 14, 2007

Karim Haddad

To download Karim Haddad's scorse / sounds, etc.
ftp://ftp.forumnet.ircam.fr/pub/UCSD

Sound are not up yet.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Talks Schedule

5/7: Rick - Haddad paper

5/14 Ian - Jazz paper, Kevin - HMM

5/21 Manoury's talk, Shlomo - Stochastic paper / OMax demo

5/28 memorial day - no class

6/4 Steve - Reinforcement / Shlomo, Jaime - Malt paper

Finals week (TBD) : Ignacio

Monday, April 09, 2007


Open Music Installation.
Not to forget for windows users:

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First copy the following font files from the "Resources/omfonts-pc" folder
in your system Fonts folder "C:/WINDOWS/Fonts/"

omicron.ttf
omsigns.ttf
omheads.ttf
omextras.ttf

Open Music Documentation on IRCAM website
http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/repmus/OpenMusic/Documentation/OMUserDocumentation/

Monday, April 02, 2007

OM Composers Book

This is a short summary of the different chapters in the book, to help you choose a paper for your course project.
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Lemouton’s “Generating melodic,harmonic, ...". Shows simple patches for K..., an opera by Manoury. Examples of melody, chord and rhythm“reservoirs”

L´evy “When the computer enables freedom...." computes prime spectra, iterated harmonic transposition, Tanner vectorial representation. Epistemological and aesthetic discussion.

Haddad's “Timesculpt in OpenMusic”. Time block algebra based on tree structures. Rotations, homotheties/scalings, inversions, filtering etc applied to time blocks.

Kretz - simulation of the movement of a ball in a closed room using Max. Import into OM.
Constrained programming. Gesture as source of musical structure.

Amoric "Mersenn numbers..." number theory. Use extracts from 18th century pieces and use constraints.

Malt "Fractals..", IFS system + theory. Fractals for constructing a “self-similar” form.
Six short pieces based on evolution of instrument register.

Nez - pitch and rhythm control techniques, morphing of harmonic series, contour and interpolation of chords, time curves. Using harmony and rhythm to filter sounds.

Nouno and Battier - “Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin”. Resonant model analysis of voice and instruments. Electronic sounds based on harmonic structures.

Sandred, "Kalejdoskop ...", CSP for rhythm. Attacks, duration relation between voices. Describes musical relevance of these rules.

Hernandez "..Lanza’s Aschenblume.." a language that generates rhythmic motifs, harmonic field, melodic envelopes. Uses uses Mikael Laurson’s Pmc Engine library.

Sprotte ".. Time Flow, Set-Theory and Constraints”, rhythmic and harmonic musical structures. set of musical objects that are organized according to rules and constraints

Bloch "Vuza canons ..", uses “regular complementary rhythmic canons of maximal category”. Modulation between canons, harmonic constraints.

Nauert ".. Caprices", top-down approach. Uses his OMTimepack library for generating durations according to specific statistical profiles.

Herv´e and Voisin ".. on Encore", down-top approach. Piece fro 18 musicians and electronics. Gesture prototypes put in Maquette.

Parra’s "Strette", link between vocals and poetic features in Paul Celan’s poem. Colour, rhythm and pitch in painting by C´ezanne -

Pena "Klangspiegel", manipulation of data generated by sound analysis. synthesis of sound and instrumental writing on the macro level.

Livorsi ".. Modalys”,control sound synthesis parameters, envelopes, resonance duration. Control and dynamic and random variations.

Thomazi-Freitas "...Dream About Dreams", use of om-tristan library. Using spectral analysis to create rhythmic and harmonic figures in composition.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Welcome

Music 270C: Compositional Algorithms
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Spring 2007
Mondays 2-5, Mandeville 125

The course will be divided between composition and research in the following way:
- Composition: we will cover the basics of OpenMusic and read the OM Composers Book for analysis of some compositions.
- Research: we will cover some basic algorithms, mostly from AI
(Artificial Intelligence) perspective.

The focus here is on adding "listening / learning" capabilities to music algorithms for more intuitive interaction and less formal "programming" approaches.

The topics to be covered in the research part include (but are not limited to):
Visualization of tonal content: works by Krumhansl, Chew
NN / SOM: Toiviainen
Stochastic Models: Conklin, Dubnov
HMM: Allan, Farbood
Improvisation and Reinforcement Learning: Assayag, Cont
Jazz Chord Grammar: Steedman, Chemillier
Old fashioned AI: Cope

Assignments: students will have a choice between a composition
project or a research paper (or combination of both). You will have to choose a topic or a piece and talk about it in class. This will help determine what will be your final presentation. Part of the class will be devoted to follow up and discussion of works in progress.