Containerized Particulate

score created in Nodal

I’ve been working a lot lately with Nodal, a generative app for music composition in development by a team at Monash University. Essentially, its MIDI, each node represents a note event, and the duration of each event is determined by the length of the connection to the proceeding node with most other parameters controlled via probability tables / lists. What’s really wonderful, though, is that it’s as if this software were plucked from my brain and lovingly treated by someone with the skill to realize it as code. I was thinking in this direction pretty heavily roughly a year ago, though my approach placed more emphasis on “intuitive” and immediate interaction, at the cost of some of the compositional depth present here.

The accompanying image is a draft of a composition I prepared in Nodal for performance as part of Environmental Aesthetics (more about this in following posts, for sure). This piece was designed with a highly reverberant space in mind, and the idea was to isolate melodic phrases in time in a way that would allow them to fully interact with the space. The quadrilaterals in the upper portion of the score are voiced by percussive synths to form odd rhythmic cycles, and the perimiter is voiced by a harmonicly dense synth voice, playing mostly lowend material with fundamentals generally below ~150 Hz.

Also, McCormack’s publications are pretty great.

This is going to be a blog where I post about things I am doing, and things that I want to be doing. I hope that it will be of use to myself and others, starting…. now.
Love,
Jared