In January 2019, I collaborated with the choreographer Renay Aumiller to create a modern dance piece called Out of the Blue. I wrote a program that prompted the audience to contribute a list of body parts and dance qualities, and then fed that creative input into an algorithm to randomly generate a series of short dance vignettes.
Each vignette featured a body part and a movement idea contributed by the audience, as well as a short piece of music to accompany the music. Renay improvised modern dance movement on top of this, to sometimes poignant or comedic effect.
I composed the musical backdrops in Alda and my program cross-faded them dynamically based on the randomly generated length of each vignette (30-90 seconds). For this recorded version, each backdrop is played for 30 seconds before cross-fading into the next.
Here is the Alda source code for each backdrop, accompanied by some notes about my creative process. Hopefully you’ll find it interesting!
I employed a little trick to inspire myself as I was composing most of these musical scenes. I wrote a program that picked 2 or 3 instruments at random and played randomly chosen notes on those instruments. The results weren’t usable out-of-the-box, but every few runs of the program, an interesting combination of instruments would occur by accident, and that inspired me to see what interesting musical ideas I could come up with using those instruments.
01
Backdrop #1 is super simple, just a long, low G on strings, punctuated regularly with timpani hits. I think it has on overall feeling of “medieval suspense”. I thought this was interesting enough as-is, and moved onto the next backdrop.
(tempo! 85)
md = (vol 80)
lg = (vol 100)
midi-timpani:
(panning 90)
o2 md g8 %downbeat [ lg g2.. o1 md g8 lg g2.. o2 md g8 ]*99
midi-string-ensemble-2:
(panning 10)
(volume 60)
(quant 99)
o1 @downbeat g1~1~1~1 *9902
For Backdrop #2, I took the output of one of the runs of my score generator program and I used it almost as-is.
The generator emitted two instrument parts, a kalimba and a music box. I played up the percussive sound of the kalimba by creating an artificial delay effect; I added three more kalimbas and had them play the same notes, spaced apart from one another in 250ms intervals, and added progressive levels of panning and volume decay. I think it kind of sounds like a ping-pong ball falling down the stairs into the basement.
(key-sig! [:e :flat :locrian])
kphrase = o2 f2397ms o3 d2598ms o3 d2638ms o3 g1949ms
mbphrase = o2 e875ms o2 e1044ms o2 c2667ms o3 e2939ms o1 e659ms
midi-kalimba "mk1":
(panning 50)
kphrase * 100
midi-kalimba "mk2":
(panning 60) (vol 75)
r250ms
kphrase * 100
midi-kalimba "mk3":
(panning 70) (vol 50)
r500ms
kphrase * 100
midi-kalimba "mk4":
(panning 80) (vol 25)
r750ms
kphrase * 100
midi-music-box:
(panning 6)
mbphrase * 10003
My generator happened to pick a MIDI ocean wave sound (the General MIDI spec includes a number of other goofy sounds like a gunshot, a telephone ringing, etc.), so I composed something simple and relaxing to accompany the sound of the waves.
A celeste outlining an A minor pentatonic cluster (A - C - D - E - G) seemed to do the trick. I had the celeste wait 10 seconds, then play the same thing, shifted down a note within the context of A minor (G - B - C - D - F). Then I just kept doing that, working my way down the scale. Boom, backdrop done. Next!
midi-seashore:
(vol 70) (pan 20)
o0 c150s
midi-celesta:
(tempo 100)
(vol 50) (pan 95)
[
r10s o4 a8 > c d e g2.
r10s o4 g8 b > c d f2.
r10s o4 f8 a b > c e2.
r10s o4 e8 g a b > d2.
r10s o4 d8 f g a > c2.
r10s o4 c8 e f g b2.
]*9904
The inspiration generator gave me a helicopter sound and pizzicato strings next. Challenge accepted! I wrote some inline Clojure code to generate sequences of D notes moving up in octaves (D1, D2, D3, D4, D5), separated by random-length pauses. I think the result sounds like the score to a movie scene where a spy is infiltrating a military base or something.
(defn random-pause
[]
(pause (duration (ms (rand-nth (range 300 4000))))))
(defn pizz-sequence
[]
(for [octave-number (range 1 5)]
[(octave octave-number)
(note (pitch :d) (duration (ms 1000)))
(random-pause)]))
(defn heli-sequence
[]
[(random-pause)
(note (pitch :c) (duration (ms (rand-nth (range 3000 10000)))))])
midi-pizzicato-strings:
(pan 30)
(repeatedly 99 pizz-sequence)
midi-helicopter:
(pan 100) (vol 50)
o0 (repeatedly 99 heli-sequence)05
For Backdrop #5, I imagined that I was playing some simple arpeggios on a clean electric guitar. I think GM instrument #101 (“FX 5 (brightness)”) is intended to be played in a higher register, but it ended up sounding pretty neat as a bass, sort of like a more electronic-sounding bowed upright bass.
(tempo! 90)
midi-electric-guitar-jazz:
(quant 400)
(pan 0)
(vol 75)
[
o3 [ c8 e g b > e < b g e ]*4
o2 [ a8 > e g b > e < b g e < ]*4
o3 [ c8 f g > c e c < g f ]*4
]*99
midi-fx-brightness:
[
o2 c1~1~1~1
o1 a1~1~1~1
o1 f1~1~1~1
]*9906
I think I must have been channeling VGM composer Nobuo Uematsu when I wrote Backdrop #6.
It’s always fun to play with changing chords while keeping the bass note the same. In this case, the bass guitar plays a steady stream of B quarter notes, while the electric piano plays a different chord every 4 measures (Bm7 - G7 - Cmaj7 - Bm7).
midi-pizzicato-strings:
(pan 10) (vol 70)
[
r1 *4
[ o6 g16 d < b g f+ d < b g f+2 | r1 ]*2
[ o6 g16 d < b g f d < b g f2 | r1 ]*2
[ o6 e16 c < b g e d c < b g2 | r1 ]*2
[ o6 d16 c < b g f+ d < b f+ d2 | r1 ]*2
]*99
midi-electric-piano-2:
(pan 90) (vol 60)
(quant 150)
[
r1 *4
[ r1 o3 b1/>d/f+/a ]*2
[ r1 o3 b1/>d/f/g ]*2
[ r1 o3 b1/>c/e/g ]*2
[ r1 o3 a1/b/>d/f+ ]*2
]*99
electric-bass:
o1 b4 *999
midi-percussion:
o2 c4 *99907
This backdrop starts with a piano alternating between Gmaj7 and Dmaj7. I added a second piano that plays exactly the same thing, but softer and panned differently, creating a nice echo effect, as if you’re standing in a cathedral and the sound from the piano is bouncing off of the back of the room.
The chord voicings I chose happened to have 5 notes in them, so I thought it would be interesting to arpeggiate the chords from top to bottom in quintuplets. This has an especially dreamy effect with the artificial echo.
(tempo! 150)
pianoPart1 = [
(quant 90)
[
[ o2 g4/>d/g/b/>f+ ] *16
[ o2 d4/a/>d/f+/>c+ ] *16
]*4
]
pianoPart2 = [
(quant 400)
[
{o4 f+ < b g d < g}2 *8
{o4 c+ < f+ d < a d}2 *8
]*2
]
pianoPart = [ pianoPart1 pianoPart2 ]*20
midi-electric-grand-piano "echo":
(vol 80) (pan 25)
pianoPart
midi-bright-acoustic-piano "main":
(vol 50) (pan 100)
r8 pianoPart
midi-synth-bass-2:
(quant 100)
[
# pianoPart1 unaccompanied
r1~1~1~1 *4
# pianoPart1 with this accompaniment
[
[ o1 g2.. > d8 a1 ]*2
[ o1 d2.. > f+8 > c+1 ]*2
]*2
# pianoPart2 unaccompanied
r1~1~1~1 *4
]* 2008
Backdrop #8 is conceptually simple, but fun to listen to. There are 8 voices, each playing a randomly generated sequence of pizzicato notes with random-length pauses. It starts with only one voice doing this, and then every 10 seconds a new voice enters. The result is that over time, the music becomes progressively more dense and chaotic, like the sound of popcorn popping in the microwave.
(key-sig! [:e :major])
(defn random-notes
[]
(for [n (range 1000)]
[(pause (duration (ms (rand-int 500))))
(octave (rand-nth (range 2 6)))
(note (pitch (rand-nth [:e :g :b :d]))
(duration (ms (rand-int 2000))))]))
midi-pizzicato-strings:
V1: (pan 15) (random-notes)
V2: (pan 90) r10s (random-notes)
V3: (pan 30) r20s (random-notes)
V4: (pan 75) r30s (random-notes)
V5: (pan 45) r40s (random-notes)
V6: (pan 60) r50s (random-notes)
V7: (pan 25) r60s (random-notes)
V8: (pan 80) r70s (random-notes)
V9: (pan 50) r80s (random-notes)