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August 18, 2006
aleatoric music composition
I've been meaning to write this up literally forever. But hey. I'm important and busy*. (*not really) Also I like playing video games. I'm sure you can see how that works out.
A mate of mine dylan (webzen: this is not london.com & the world is our soundtoy.com) asked me ages ago to score some music for him. What he wanted me to score was actually what you see above. (but more bars obviously). It's mostly chewing gum and dirty marks on the plastic stripping that is on the edge of train platforms.
I added an extra bar line below so I had the normal 5 lines to work with and fired up Sibelius. What I ended up with was pleasantly suprising.
Results in midi format Download file
There's some really nice little bits in this, some work better than others, but from a compositional standpoint for music scored from bubblegum on a trainplatform it isn't bad. This is an idea I'd like to explore in greater depth, and possibly take some photos myself and score my local trainstation. Perhaps with a few determined music geeks we could score a bunch of trainstations the world over. A correspondingly busy trainstation would result in many more grubby marks to score. The other implication (and this is something dylan's soundtoys really made me think about) is that in the world around us, there are myriad opportunities for musical inspiration, and in this literal sense of scoring as faithfully as possible, the real word theres a really pleasing idea at the core. And I certainly don't mean to be twee, but everyone no matter how untalented (such as myself) can look for inspiration and create music.
Edit: Dylan tells me it's not incidental music composition, but aleatoric music composition!
Posted by funnelbc at August 18, 2006 11:13 AM
Comments
so.. whats the outcome of that train platform notation? any progress to a full or complete song?
Posted by: Strada Lunii ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.onetonnemusic.com/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 2, 2006 01:25 PM
Sorry for the late response Strada, at the moment I haven't had time to come back to this, but i have every intention of completing a piece based on this. (it's just a matter of having the spare time!)
Posted by: funnelbc at October 23, 2006 09:09 AM
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