Month: October 2017

I have final ordered a Hurdy Gurdy.  My gofund page is still active because any money will help pay for it.  I order the gurdy from Altarwind.com.  It has 2 melody string, and 3 drones along with the buzzing bridge.  In addition I put upgrades into it so each drone has a capo on it, it has buttons to turn strings on and off, sypathetic strings that work almost like natural reverb (they vibrate wth the instrument) and am getting it color treated to be a dark orange with black highlights.  I am also going to experiment with acoustic guitar pickups or making my own contact mic.  I can not wait to get it and learn of to play.  My goal is to make this a traveling instrument and be able to write and perform at music conferences and in the streets.  Hopeful I can get good enough to put a call for scores out for composers or have friends write music for me to play and record.

I started a new job teaching and part of my teaching load is post tonal theory.  As I was teaching a course I thought to myself, there is no program that I could find that gives the prime form, subsets, transpositions, pitch centricity, ICV, complimentary set and a summation square (for invariant tones under transposition).  So I got the idea to use the Bach library in Max/MSP and build a patch that gives all of this information in an easy to understand and manipulate fashion.  Here is a screen shot

 

The top left box shows the main interface where you can enter sets in different ways, transpose the information, a histogram for note occurrences, various boxes for different transpositions and buttons to bring up the other screens.  The top right screen gives you a summation square for invariant tones under transposition, bottom right is all the possible subsets and the bottom left is a pitch lattice that shows the set in another way.

My future plan is to take all the subsets and add an abstract subset function.  I have been using this for my own personal compositions and analysis but also as a way to think of other tools that are useful for understanding music.  it is my hopes that other types of graphs and functions will be added so the patch turn into a visual analysis tool for various types of music.  Right now I am not openly distributing the patch, but if you are interest in it, email me and I will send it to you.  All you need is Max/MSP and the Bach and Cage packages.

 

If you enjoy reading my posts, find my posts useful, read my research, look and listen to my music and photography please consider donating to my gofundme on my main bio page.