WireWorks in Concert

Concert with microtonal and interactive computer music
******************************************************

Ensemble WireWorks will perfom a program with microtonal and interactive music
by Georg Hajdu, Belinda Reynolds, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Manfred Stahnke
and Frederic Rzewski

on October 24, 1996
at 8.00 PM

Concert hall:
C.u.b.a
Achtermannstr. 10-12
48143 Muenster
Germany

The program includes:

Two Cartoons
for synthesizer and computer by Georg Hajdu (in 17 TET).

Multitudinous Voices
for mezzo-soprano, keyboard and interactive computer by Belinda Reynolds
(software written in MAX)

Intermezzo
for narrator, synthetic choir, keyboards and interactive computer by Georg
Hajdu.
(The harmonic and melodic material is based on an FFT of telephone hiss.
The extracted pseudo-harmonic spectra have a random set of microtones that
don't match any just or tempered scale).

Studie II by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
This piece was recreated by students of the Muenster School of Music with
modern computer technology based on Stockhausen's instructions given in the
preface of his score. This piece represents an early attempt to unify
spectral and tonal principles. For this, Stockhausen used a tempered scale
with a step size of pow(5, 1/25).

Partch Harp for harp and microtonal synthesizer by Manfred Stahnke.
Manfred Stahnke, professor of composition at the Hamburg School of Music,
uses a tempered scale with pow(1.9560685, 1/12) for the synthesizer that
approximates just 5/4 and just 7/4. Lacking the interval of the octave,
this scale is characterized by a constant "tonal shift." The harp in turn
has stable octaves and just major thirds and minor sevenths as well.

Coming Together by Frederic Rzewski was originally scored for ensemble with
narrator and varied instruments that pick notes in an improvisatory fashion
from a pentatonic sequence of notes. In our version for keyboard and
interactive electronics, the sequence is performed by the keyboard player
while the computer--following the Rzewski score--simulates the actions of
the improvising instrumentalists.

The performers are:
Georg Hajdu, electronics
Jennifer Hymer, keyboard
Annette Kleine-Rademacher, mezzo-soprano
Christiane Steffens, harp
Bettina Stucky, narration

More information on WireWorks will soon be available at
http://www.uni-muenster.de/Musikhochschule/Dozenten/Hajdu/WireWorks.html

Send questions to: hajdu@uni-muenster.de



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> So, HOW CAN PITCH BEND BE USED EFFECTIVELY FOR MICROTUNING?
> ANSWER: Use a program to enter the appropriate Pitch Bend message BEFORE
> the note. This is simple, easy and convenient to do in real time with full
> polyphony, using MICROTONAL MIDI TERMINAL, available for $60 at the below
> address.

That's certainly a start, but that still doesn't work in a slurred, or legato
note transition. You'll bend the pitch of the trailing end of the previous note
in that scenario.


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> That's certainly a start, but that still doesn't work in a slurred, or
> legato note transition. You'll bend the pitch of the trailing end of the
> previous note in that scenario.

This seems an opportunity for a clever algorithm to minimise that
effect. It will need as many MIDI channels as the user can spend for
each voice. It could select used channels on a least recently used
basis except where it can take advantage of occurrences of notes that
are multiples of 100 cents different from some previous note in which
case it can reuse a channel without changing the pitch bend value.
The algorithm could also trade off between selecting the channel that
would need the smallest pitch bend change from the previous note and
taking the channel which has the lowest volume. It would need to
know the voice parameters for that of course. It might also fiddle
with the moments of note-off messages if a decaying tone would
otherwise be audibly detuned.
Has anyone done something like this?
The unproblematic case is if one has only one voice and a fixed octave
based scale of 16 tones or less, the pitch bends can be set for each
channel at the beginning.

Manuel Op de Coul coul@ezh.nl

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Denny Genovese wrote "Sliding tones in the attack of notes
indicate that pitch Bend is being sent AFTER the note message".

That is not true, on many computer-based soundcard systems at
least. On my PC(386)+SoundBlaster system, a pitch-bend must be
timed about 10 ms in advance of the start of the note, or a
slide can be heard in the note attack. A soon as I started to
post recordings on the net, I found that a lot of other
computer systems and cards show effects similar to mine. I
also note that real instruments have decays after the end of
notes, and a pitch-bend command will slide them too.

That's why I ended up restricting my pitch-bends to the
beginning of a piece then waiting 1/4 s before the start of
note on's. Otherwise, you would have to determine the decay
time of the worst- case note-off plus the pitch-bend actuation
time, assign notes only to channels that had been quiet at
least that long, and insert the pitch-bend to be sent at least
the actuation time prior to note-on. Can be done of course,
but it would take a lot more programming than my method does.

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