Re: Visual improvisation

Hi Paul

I enjoyed your post about improvisation. I'd like to hear the 22-tet progression
improvisation!

Here are a few thoughts that might start a composition methods thread - I'd be
interested to hear what other have to say.

I've tried improvising and notating each note as I play it, and that can impede
the flow of ideas, as you say.

Also tried recording the improvisation to MIDI, then editing that, but the raw
midi file needs a lot of work to make it into a score proper.

I know also some composers improvise into a program that quantises their playing,
and that makes it easier to finish it into a score. I have just started trying out
that approach, and it works rather well. In NWC, the way it works is that
one makes a metronome track consisting of a bar, or several bars of percussion.
Can have any number of notes in it, so one can do 5/4 or whatever.
You then loop it, and play along with it, and NWC then quantizes your improvisation
to the percussion track. You end up with a score of the piece.

The percussion is just a metronome, and on playback you have your playing on its own.

It's too early to say how much I'll use this approach. It is interesting to
experiment with. When improvising my rhythms are generally far more flexible
and varied than the ones one ends up with when using a metronome, and indeed I
like to kind of encourage that, the kind of poetry of free rhythm - perhaps
in reaction, as there are so many examples of metronomic rhythms around us
that one feels it is nice to go the other way instead. So, not sure yet how
well I will be able to learn to improvise to a metronome and input scores
that way.

However, what I have followed up is a kind of visual approach. You start off
working out each note on the keyboard, and typing it into the score, but at a
certain point you start to see / intuit that it would be nice to place a few
notes here on the score. Then, you begin to improvise visually.

It's particularly striking in my case as I can't yet look at a score and
hear what it will sound like. I get enough of an idea of the shape of the tunes
to follow music from a score, but not enough to hear it by looking at a score
without the actual music playing.

However, what I find is that a certain point into a piece I can begin to
place the notes visually, thinking, that's a nice place to put them. Then when
I click the play button, it does indeed work, even though I don't know exactly
what it is going to sound like. That's what I like to call visual improvisation.
Kind of serendipity comes in too, works rather well.

Because I can't hear what I write anyway, then I find it works just as well
if I have the score retuned to any arbitrary scale - after a certain point
into the piece, one begins to intuit where to place the notes, kind of how
the new notes will fit into the shape and pattern of the notes placed so far,
and often the best work happens at that point.

If one does it too early though, then you just get nonsense - notes that look
nice, but just sound like nonsense. So it isn't purely visual, but strongly
visual.

Another nice thing about composing by typing into a score, even when working it
out note by note on the keyboard, is that it is very conducive to sparse
understated harmonies.

It helps to have a score editor that one can type notes into really quickly
- I get the impression that they vary in this respect, and some give very
nice typographical results, but aren't so fast to enter a score into from
the p.c. keyboard.

Anyway, what I'm particularly interested to hear about is to what extent
the visual element enters into composition, and whether composers think
there is such a thing as purely visual improvisation, and how it enters
into their working methods.

Robert

--- In tuning@y..., "Robert Walker" <robertwalker@n...> wrote:
> Hi Paul
>
> I enjoyed your post about improvisation. I'd like to hear the 22-
tet progression
> improvisation!

One of them was webcast on WNYC -- did you miss all that?

Johnny said he'll send me the others.
>
> Anyway, what I'm particularly interested to hear about is to what
extent
> the visual element enters into composition, and whether composers
think
> there is such a thing as purely visual improvisation, and how it
enters
> into their working methods.

Joseph is planning to do a lot of composing "visually" off the 3D
blackjack lattice . . . just by tracing out a path of interconnected
tetrads, and then perhaps writing a melody over the resulting
harmonic progression.