31–40 of 52 posts
An old saying (old to me anyway) regarding improvising in music is that if you make a mistake, just keep repeating the mistake- it will sound deliberate. It’s surprisingly effective.
Many years ago I was playing with a music creation application. On a lark, i button mashed and created a random sequence of dissonant chords of random lengths. It sounded as awful as you would expect. I took this sequence and repeated it several times. About 15 years later I can still remember exactly how it sounded, and remember it eventually becoming pleasant to my ear.
Prime numbers are important in music. They're actually random. Repetition of this randomness makes music beautiful.
2 and 3 are, but that's about where it ends. Yeah you can do subdivisions of 5 and 7 but it starts to be an academic exercise at that point. So, no, prime numbers don't have any special relationship to music, sorry. Factors of 12 and 16 are actually the most common and useful groupings in most music that people can dance to.
12 has a wonderful property of being variously composable by 2, 3, 4, 6 - and one reason why it's so commonly used in music is that it's not a prime number.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an Ableton ad disguised as a ted talk.
It worked, I was like 'what program is that?' and found Ableton Live. I then said 'What is the free software alternative?' and found LMMS and Ardour. Go with the free software folks.
Ardour development obviously has a very small team so they are constrained, but I am not sure going to Ardour simply because it is free software is a good reason if you actually want to get stuff done.
Perhaps it has come on a lot since I used it. It relied on Jack under macOS when I used it, I think, which seemed odd to me instead of native audio bindings.
Many years ago I was playing with a music creation application. On a lark, i button mashed and created a random sequence of dissonant chords of random lengths. It sounded as awful as you would expect. I took this sequence and repeated it several times. About 15 years later I can still remember exactly how it sounded, and remember it eventually becoming pleasant to my ear.
Haha, maybe more of us have had this experience than I thought. My parents bought me a little electronic keyboard when I was young and lots of times I would play some sequence of notes and they'd suddenly sound really nice. Like I'd made something. Well, I had no music theory so it was probably just total crap that had started sounding nice to me.
An old saying (old to me anyway) regarding improvising in music is that if you make a mistake, just keep repeating the mistake- it will sound deliberate. It’s surprisingly effective.
He changed the chords that the audience selected and reordered them, first off. Furthermore, the demonstration does not prove or even suggest the thesis that "repetition is what makes music beautiful", the end result being of questionable beauty, the element of repetition being unclear (is he referring to the looping, or the priming effect on the audience having heard it already, or something else?), and the relevanc…
I believe you're being unfair. Extending the chords is fair and so is voicing them to be close to each other. Neither of those count as "changing" the chords and the musicians in the audience knew this.
Many years ago I was playing with a music creation application. On a lark, i button mashed and created a random sequence of dissonant chords of random lengths. It sounded as awful as you would expect. I took this sequence and repeated it several times. About 15 years later I can still remember exactly how it sounded, and remember it eventually becoming pleasant to my ear.
I have a similar experience with quarter-tone music. I used to experiment with it a little bit and created a short theme[0] for one of my characters that utilized multiple quartertones, as opposed to just semitones that are used in usual Western music.
I remember that it sounded alien and way off when I created it and shortly afterwards. Now, it sounds... ordinary. I got used to it and found enjoyment in how it sounds.
[0] https://soundcloud.com/phoe-krk/solyre - sorry for the shameless plug, providing this for reference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It worked, I was like 'what program is that?' and found Ableton Live. I then said 'What is the free software alternative?' and found LMMS and Ardour. Go with the free software folks.
I subscribed to Ardour for a while so that I could get the macOS version and the amount I paid towards Ardour I could have bought Logic Pro X that does about 500% more, including functioning MIDI, sorry to say. At the time Ardour did not have this, nor half of the other features I needed just for basic mixing and editing. Ardour development obviously has a very small team so they are constrained, but I am not sure go…
Repetition is one way to enhance predictability. Stock musical transformations - modulation to a related key - are another.
This is a known thing in perceptual psychology, based on something called the Wundt Curve.
Too little novelty is boring. Too much novelty is incomprehensible and frustrating. Just the right amount is an enjoyable sweet spot.
Of course this varies for different listeners. If you're a fan of modern "squeaky door" contemporary classical music you're going to demand a very complex and unpredictable experience that pop fans find unbearably unmusical - and vice versa.