PRIMAL MUSE

Dick Pountain/Tue 17 December 2002/1:20 pm/Idealog 101

Music matters more to some people than to others. I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, humorous and humane people who are more or less indifferent to it: they don't care whether they hear music or not, nor much what they hear. I'm not like that - music matters a great deal to me. I came to music by a weird and roundabout route, having been almost put off it for ever by an authoritarian schoolteacher who liked to humiliate those kids who couldn't sing (I never learned to sight-read as a result). Along with a bunch of other rebels I discovered imported American blues and R&B records, and we formed a little secret cult around Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy. It took years more to dig down through layers of prejudice (at first we only permitted guitars, but Charlie Parker cured that) and history so that by the time I was a student I could quite happily follow Mingus Oh Yeah with a Bartok string quartet and notice no incongruity. My musical taste is nowadays very broad in the horizontal (genre) dimension but extremely narrow in the vertical (quality) dimension. I listen to everything from blues, country and bluegrass through soul, funk and jazz to opera, lieder, orchestral and chamber music. I can't work with background music because if its playing I have to listen to it.

Music can be a most effective therapy in these grisly times. Whenever some new atrocity is revealed, the knowledge that I still belong to the same species as the person who wrote the Goldberg Variations is a source of real comfort. Of course there's a temptation to go too far and claim that music is my substitute religion. I don't believe in God, never have and never will, but certain passages enable me to imagine what it would be like to believe. Then again, I can vividly imagine what it must be like to believe in God as you steer a Boeing 737 into the World Trade Centre, so this is not a reliable technique for pursuing world peace...

In my I've time I've played several instruments including guitar, bass, tenor sax and I'm currently teaching myself Dobro. I've played guitar in blues bands, reggae bass and even been in a Nigerian high-life band. I never pursued it professionally because I never felt good enough, or perhaps I felt too lazy to become good enough. There is a real (but perplexing) difference between good music and bad music, though that's not something to get get into too deeply here, even were I capable. Certainly it's not simply a matter of technical skill, nor even of the sincerity or 'authenticity' of the composer/performer. What for example is happening when someone who's never heard Bach before hears a piece murdered by a bad pianist? One thing that's certain is that music doesn't become good just because I like it. Let's guess that 95% of all music performed is crap: then of the 5% that isn't, I like say a fifth, the rest being stuff that I accept is good, can respect others liking for it, but can't like myself.

In recent years I've taken to using my PC to make music. At first I messed around playing along with things like Band-in-a-Box, then tried writing arrangements directly into a MIDI sequencer or interactive music generators like Koan Pro, but I didn't find any of these satisfying. Then I decided to try my hand at program-generated music, and that has become quite absorbing. I wrote myself a MIDI library in Turbo Pascal which just generates MIDI file elements from some high-level primitives that control note pitch, duration and volume. Then I write further Pascal programs in terms of these primitive operations, which when run generate a file of MIDI commands. I started out by experimenting with fugues, canons and fractal tunes where the same pattern repeats at different scales. All those transformations that Bach once performed in his head, like inverting or reflecting a particular theme, are of course to a computer just trivial string manipulations, and 100 or 1000 parts are no more difficult than two. Some of the output sounds almost like music, but not very much of it, and even that sounds like rejected work by American minimalists Steve Reich or John Adams.  

It soon became clear that too much regularity is anathema to any musical effect, so I started introducing more and more random dimensions in order to 'humanise' it. Then I had an idea. Ever since my teens, like most other math nerds, I'd been fascinated by the prime numbers and spent days trying out all manner of tricky layouts looking for patterns. Why not hear what a pseudo-random sequence like the primes *sounds* like? So I wrote a program that generates the first 2000 primes, computes the gaps between them (otherwise the music zooms quickly into ultrasound) and then uses these to modulate the pitch, duration and volume of a contrapuntal piece. The result is very odd indeed but it is music of a sort: its rhythm is pretty tricky to dance to, but the weird 'tune' gets right into your head after a few listens. If you'd like to hear it there's a General MIDI file on this month's cover disk called PRIMAL.MID but I don't expect it to be next year's Christmas number 1.