Music in Granular Motion

Final project for M220b: Compositional Algorithms taught by professor Ge Wang.

Documentation and code can be found here.

Harmony Study I

An experiment in unifying harmonic and rhythmic structure via integration of harmonic and rhythmic processes. Two types of process are explored: additive and cyclic.

Rhythm Study I

This piece is a study in structuring and developing polyrhythms. Alongside an accelerating heartbeat baseline, there are three drum lines, each with a distinct timbre, and each beginning from a rhythmic nucleus of duplets, triplets, and quintuplets, respectively. These patterns evolve through a series of mutations and replications until reaching a final 30-beat pattern in double time. As they evolve, they are systematically layered and un-layered against each other, so that the entire piece may be roughly divided into 4 parts which are built upon the polyrhythms 3:2, 5:3, 5:2, and 5:3:2.

Music for Dawn

I like ambient music, and after reading this excellent blog post on Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, I decided to give a try at writing my own. Music for Dawn is named in homage to Eno’s album, and uses the same technique of looping fixed-length musical phrases.

I wanted to do something more, however, by giving the piece direction, a kind of paradoxical movement-within-stillness that is characteristic of light and sky during dawn. Ambient music is conventionally static, but Music for Dawn has structure. The piece is divided into three parts, and each part introduces one or more of the following musical developments:

1. New Timbre
2. New musical pattern
3. Mutation of old musical pattern

In addition, each part introduces a new unique scale degree. The piece is written in D-flat lydian, but the patterns of part 1 are restricted to only 5 scale tones. Part 2 introduces patterns with the major 2nd, and finally part 3 introduces the augmented 4th, thereby granting the full, majestic lydian sound.

I’ve included a rough score below. The timings below each pattern match the music video, but are pretty arbitrary. The numbers in parenthesis above each measure indicate what parts that pattern is to be looped.