Assignment One

due Tuesday January 31st by midnight

Assignment 1 is due January 31st (Tuesday). Just in case, Tuesday night, not Tuesday early morning.

First you will need to get familiar with the basics of Common Lisp, start Jack and set up Qsynth with the default soundfont (you can use other soundfonts if you like), open Portmidi from the Common Lisp environment and send scores to the synth using functions that include the "process" Common Music macro. Surf here for more details on what you should do...

Assignment

Use the resources made available during the last week and a half to compose a small serial music piece (twelve tone composition).

a few requirements:

• duration: must last at least 30 seconds long (and no more than 10 minutes :-)
• instruments: you should use at least three instruments of the soundfont you choose.
• the matrix: write a lisp program that calculates "the matrix" of twelve tone row transformation and use it in the piece.

Please read this: your submission should include all the lisp code that generates the piece in a way that we can recreate it from scratch. Please test the code before including it in the submission.

As for style, it can be anything (rap, merengue, polka, traditional calypso, jungle, abstract). For those with experience in composing this assignment should pose no problems. For the others I would suggest that you don't try for a specific style, just play around and find something you like. Don't get stuck trying to "render" something you have in your mind, that can be quite difficult, get a set of sounds you like and start experimenting with different layered patterns.

One more thing. A plain copy of one of the examples we went through during the class with some numbers changed will not get you much in terms of grade. Those examples are just a starting point for your experimentation.

Have fun!