MUSIC MAESTRO PLEASE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 212 14/03/2012

I love music. By that I don't merely mean that I *like* music, and I don't mean that I write to a constant background of pop music from Spotify or the radio (on the contrary I can't write to music because I can't not listen so it distracts me). The kind of music I like is *good* music, by which I mean that ~1% of every genre that delivers the goods, that takes you away. It started in my teens with American rock and R&B (Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley), progressed through blues to jazz, then to classical (the links ran Charlie Parker to Bartok, back to Bach, then forward via Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy). Bluegrass, country, reggae, dubstep, Irish, Indian, just about anything as long as it's excellent. I play music too - guitar, bass guitar and dobro tolerably well, saxophone crudely - and I'm renowned among my friends for being able to extract a tune from any bizarre instrument I encounter, from conch shell to bamboo nose flute.

This being so, it's not surprising that over the years I've used computers to listen to music, to store music, to play music and even to compose music. As soon as I got a PC with a sound card I was writing programs, first in Basic, then in Forth, to play tunes on it, but perhaps because I play real non-keyboard instruments that aspect never really grabbed me - I've never owned a MIDI keyboard or other MIDI instrument. What did grab me was the challenge of trying to program the computer itself to generate sounds that might be accepted as music. Doing that from scratch is no mean feat because computers are completely without musical feeling, they have no sense of melody, harmony or rhythm, so you the human have to supply all that, one way or another.

The most obvious way is by creating an authoring platform that has the rules of some musical genre built-into it. There are dozens of sequencer-like apps available now that achieve this for various strains of dance music, since computers are really good at calculating complicated beat patterns. There's also Koan Pro, well-known to fans of Brian Eno (I'm not one), which provides an enormously complex grid on which you can compose abstract kinds of music by tweaking hundreds of parameters. I wrestled with it for some months many years ago, but something in its structure still lent everything I tried a regular, dance-like beat. My formative years were spent immersed in bebop, '60s free jazz and country blues, where beat is vital but flexible, springy, variable - Parker's lightning scales, Robert Johnson's frantic strums, a Danny Richmond drum flurry - and I wanted that sort of sprung-step feeling in my computer-generated music rather than a strict BPM metronome. 

There was nothing for it but to build my own, so in the early '90s I wrote myself a MIDI generator. In those days Turbo Pascal was my language of choice and so I read the MIDI spec, deciphered the file format and wrote myself an API that let me output streams of valid MIDI events from a Pascal program. Then I wrote a library of functions that generate phrases, loops, rhythm patterns and other music elements. One crucial decision was not to represent whole notes but to separate pitch, duration and volume so programs could manipulate them separately. There were mathematical transforms to reverse or invert a tune, in the manner of Bach or John Adams. I composed "tunes" by expressing an algorithm in a short Pascal program, then compiling and running it to output a playable MIDI file. One early effort was based on the first 2000 prime numbers (my excuse; I'd just read "Godel, Escher, Bach"). These early tunes are feeble examples of then-fashionable minimalism, multi-part fugues that no human could play, sub-Adams experiments in phase shifting, piano pieces like Conlon Nancarrow on a very bad day.

Windows killed off Turbo Pascal and though I always meant to re-write an interactive version (that is, cutting out the intermediate MIDI file) in Delphi, I never got around to it. Later I fell for the charms of Ruby and planned to write an interactive composing platform in that: I still have the Gem containing the necessary MIDI interface, but that never happened either. What finally revived my interest was meeting a young American muso who turned me onto SoundCloud.com, which does for music what Flickr does for photos, and reading Philip Ball's superb book "The Music Instinct" which transformed my understanding of harmony by explaining it at both physical and physiological levels.

I can write Turbo Pascal better than ever by installing its command line compiler as a Tool in the excellent TextPad editor. MIDI remains MIDI and tools for mangling it are ten-a-penny. My latest efforts are closer to free-form jazz, Gil Evans on horse tranquilisers rather than Philip Glass. If you liked Frank Zappa, or the theme music from South Park, you might be able to tolerate them: if you lean more towards Adele or Michael Buble then (Health Warning) they might make you ill. And anyone who mentions Tubular Bells is asking for a punch up the 'froat.

[Dick Pountain hopes that the way to Carnegie Hall is via a FOR..NEXT loop, but isn't holding his breath. You can sample the tunes at http://snd.sc/Aumzot]