Author: Thaís Alvarenga

Throughout most of my life, I have understood music composition to be an arrangement of sounds in a specific manner and duration in order to convey a mood (message).
However, this reading aimed to question that, but it left me feeling confused. At first, it starts by explaining that a basic melody is not necessarily music. Music needs to have:

development

evolution

form

a sense of anticipation

I’m not sure if perhaps I did not understand the reading but I find that definition to be contradictory with the message of the paper. The author explains that a repeating melody lacks anticipation because the audience already knows what type of information to expect. However, modern songs are actually 1-3 minutes in length (not very long and with repeating melodies) and most people tend to listen to songs over and over again. Of course, after a certain amount of time, people get exhausted from listening to the same thing, but then, wouldn’t that mean that the length rather than the repetition is what is important in a composition?

The reading touches on the topic of random generation vs random corruption, but in traditional music composition, things are rarely random. So perhaps this randomness is something that computer composition could add (which is still not 100% random because computers till now can not create 100% randomness). It seems to me that it could actually allow for a more dynamic listening experience as each version of a song could be slightly different to the next because there is randomness associate.

Then, I’m also wondering if improvisaton can be thought as spontaneous composition, or basically creating a melody in the spot. Tying to this, the reading also concerned itself with what an original piece is and what it is not. There is a process to compose music, there are rules that can be bend to the author’s will and there is inspiration from existing music. So if most of the composition process is derived from previous songs/works and rules, then what makes a piece original?

On a side note, it was interesting for me to read about how people process, perceive and listen to information differently because that was exactly what the Apple Launch said, using it to justify buying the new AirPods Pro.

Hello! I didn’t have time to show everything today. I really wanted to show this code but I ran out of time 🙈, so I’m attaching a video here:

This is the code:

shape(2).color(1,1,0.5).rotate(({time})=>(time%360)/2)
.modulate(osc(25,0.1,0.5)
.kaleid(50)
.scale(({time})=>Math.sin(time*1)*0.5+1)
.modulate(noise(0.6,0.5)),0.5)


I was very surprised by the reading’s claim that every live coder has a personal style that they develop through their performances. I remember in class Professor Aaron mentioned that we are basically learning to express ourselves in a different language (algorithms). I found this to be something very interesting and the reading highlighted the ways live coders were developing the programming languages they used for their performances in order to redefine the ways they express their art.

When I was reading that, a comment said by my Data Structures and Algorithms professor came to mind. She said that we all have our own styles of coding and that shows through our way of writing logic in our projects. Of course, she was saying this mainly to get us worried about plagiarism. But, it made me think of the group projects that I’ve worked on and how we all had different ways of doing things that showed through the code (how we made functions, how we commented and even how we declared variables). A lot of it has to do with personal preference and with finding techniques that work for us.

At the same time, I was also thinking about how we personalize our code editors to create a work environment that gives us the best results. For instance, I have a very particular theme in VS Code and a very particular way of organizing my windows in Unity. It made me reflect on we “decorate” these online workspaces (similar to decorating a studio or office) so that it aids in our creative process.

What I am trying to say is that the paper made me think about how we all have our own styles of writing code in general and how that can show through very distinctly when we decide to do creative and live coding.