User:Cbeachy

This quarter I decided to compose a piece for acoustic instruments. I came away from 220b thinking I would have better luck composing my own piece than having an algorithm generate it. This is probably due to the fact that I am a better musician than coder. It has been a while since I made a composition, and I realized while composing this piece how much I enjoy the compositional process. Composing your own piece is a great way to learn about your own musical cognitive process and makes you really think about what types of parameters should evolve over time to make a cohesive piece of music. Thus far I have been unsuccessful in programming an algorithm to deal with these musical parameters in a creative and human-like way. That would be a very non- trivial task. Anyway, itʼs easier and more fun to simply generate the piece myself. It is a lot of fun to solve problems like how motifs should evolve and interact over time, what kinds of textures should follow others, and other high level musical phenomena. " As far as weekly updates go, I basically composed a few new measures every week. I also went down to Santa Clara to consult with my friend/composer Alex Christie and get some outside feedback and ideas of pieces to listen to for inspiration. The quarter culminated in a final recording where we were missing one violin and percussion. Nevertheless the recording sounds pretty good, and gives me a good idea of what things to change about the piece. I am planning to extend this first movement as well as write a second, more aggressive movement over the summer/next year and will post a version of the piece on this wiki once I have a good recording.