People's grandparents to your parents and everyone else's had cliches like "One size fits all" - which in reality is completely inaccurate. It cannot - it's a metaphor which will never be correct from clothes sizes to preferences in anything which make us all individuals....In terms of musical notation and other facets of music a one way of doing it can be correct and in specific defined (non-ambiguous) scenarios, it can be incorrect. As you implied, other facets are far more complex and are adjusted to style/genre, tempo and also as you indicated, too much to list.

Ambiguity in music composition can be exciting, not in the discussion so much unless speaking of the ambiguous constructs within a piece of music. I think Foster is confusing the potential for ambiguity against a defined requirement to be precise and going onto a tangent that is not necessarily related as a consequence of that confusion. Sweeping generalisations answer very few questions. They are indicators mostly and not a solution provider. It is like seeing someone place four colours in front of a person asking 'define what they are' They could answer red, yellow, orange and green if that is what they are or go into a discussion how the eye is deceived like light through a prism and then saying it is a trick question because they are actually not colours at all because the retina is doing...while the refraction through........ You get the point. The sweeping statement "They are colours".

Directly without ambiguity to the Thread topic - The author was asking about
1. melody composition and anything in theory accompanying it in whatever form
2. Melodic intervals not harmonic chords to help with writing melodies that are more consciously created and calculated
3. Avoid using ears due to fear of copying someone else's work.

There are composition books out there that have robotic instructions. Probably the best answer would have been to say "read this" and closed the thread.

At no point did the thread author ask for anything to do with ambiguity or a discussion on ambiguity and we ALL got sucked in, myself included.

I would not be unhappy if Oly deleted this post and everything affiliated, we all got sucked into it because seriously, it became a distraction for all of us even though we all tried to get it back on track with reason and reason sorry to say, just will not work.

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2021

ambiguity is relevant in a discussion on melody, because melodies (at least interesting ones) are often ambiguous with respect to tonal gravity and rely on other elements to provide context. even then they can sometimes remain musicologically ambiguous -- and that is all perfectly ok, as long as they fulfill the desired role or the intended effect. it is more a matter of politeness, and user-friendlyness, to what extent the creator reveals intent. is jimi hendrix, 'star spangled banner', interperetation a patriotic statement or an anti-neo-colonial-war statement? are those firecrackers and fireworks or bombs and gunfire? or maybe it is something else. (a pretty abstract example but an example none the less)

short answer: you are still contextually relevant with respect to the thread. IMO anyway.

 

Thanks for the belief in me and others remaining in context. The key word is context. I was concerned all of us were going off-topic because of questions that seemed unrelated and we all answered them.

 

if you are as conversant with music and its creation as you profess, then you would be aware that it is your job as the composer to create the reference point. you would also be aware that there are ample methods of doing so. to the improvisor, the reference point is self-evident. good musicians who have played together a while will follow each other -- it is like a conversation and the song is the topic. there are also methods of backing someone that allow them the freedom to explore. it is very exciting in a live, or studio, environment (at least for the musician) because at any time you can fall flat on your face, and a comradery as a group on musically dangerous excursions -- suspended only by your collective competence. to an appreciative listener a unique experience of a distillation of years of accrued knowledge and skill expressed in the moment.

it has already been addressed, but 'randomness' or the illusion of randomness is irrelevant here. randomness is increasingly being seen as gradients of determinism. in music it is especially so, because you are reacting to a varyingly predetermined frame, and informed by however many years of training/experience to specifically react to said stimulus.

edit: i probably do not need to considering my statement but i will clarify that i think improvisation has always been a very important part of music. it is not particularly relevant to this thread.

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2021

I've packed up my stuff and I'm going to unambiguity land. Anyone who's interested can come with me, but I can't promise we'll get there safely. I also found an illegible and spidery map. I'm on my way early in the morning.

 

I was gonna reply something smart to ad-heesive,
and highlight Riviera/Marseilles/Foester's? unsuspected ability to find the most ambiguous spots in music theory,
where certain aspects cannot be 100% explained by regular books, and cannot be summarized with simple categorical sentences,
but need a more comprehensive and empirical in-depth research..

Things the usual/basic books and lessons don't cover, and won't cover for Practical reasons,
but that indeed exist, and must be covered somewhere in the heavier academic vernacle (as they're in the realm of possibility),
yet usually simple/irrelevant enough things that are not essential to music/understanding,
but that regular foundational knowledge/understanding + empirical hands-on research could answer..

But even if one did actually do it and catalogue the stuff, it will be to no avail because,
Music is not a purely analytical/intellectual or technical thing, it's not maths or statistics,
but being an Art form is mostly a Creative/artistic, Intuition and spiritual based kind of thing..

So even having all that shit catalogued will be of no use,
because the thing (Music) has to come from the deepest corners of your being,
from your intuition, from your spirit and creative mind,
from the sublimation of your knowledge, id's expression/creative Will, natural inspiration,
your Brain, Hands and Balls..


But fakk if it's all a Lost cause,
and I can only have more sympathy now for the Romans and their Crucifixion customs..

And you know, we could even do it in a funny way,
it could be a smooth Drama-less and even Humorous operation, where we just merrily nail you to the audiosex Cross,
and let the vultures be entertained by your mind-bugging nonsense..

I do have a sense of humor tho,
so I can appreciate the creativity sometimes

 

it is already evident that you are going nowhere. no need to clarify.

 

While it may have more original harmony than 4 chord loops used in Western pop music, it is 100 % derivative. I do not know who and when exactly was invented this style, but there are thousands of such pop songs in Asian music from this region; it is even typical for anime (Japanese cartoons) soundtracks.

 

So true and so nicely ambiguous.

If we're celebrating ambiguity... "Leaving Troll alone" sounds so sweet to me no matter how I interpret.

"On your journey, dear Troll, just follow your nose, and may your future motions be as fruitful as your past"

 

Rhythm and Melody - Polyrhythms

I'm trying to do too much in this comment - I'll see how it goes.
Pulling together a few ideas that are only awkwardly related...

1. In this thread, there have been occasional mentions of the importance of rhythm in melody and most of those mentions seemed to be very appropriately implying that 'rhythm is always essentially and obviously important'
2. During the recent joke skirmishes on ambiguity (which we all know is an obvious major component of music), reminders of how melody and context are intimately related. Some mention of harmonic context; not as much mention of rhythmic context.
3. Subjective attitudes to theory rules. e.g., (maybe?) useful as descriptive devices versus viewed more cynically as prescriptive devices, And that can include attitudes towards the role of maths in music.
4. Subjective attitudes (again pros and cons) to using software as a creative support in various aspects of music making.

So, the above four points are scruffily mashed into the following context (for me).

As a listener, I often really like polyrhythmic material. I am NOT a percussionist. I am easily entranced by (for example) Indian percussionists playing stuff that I could certainly never play myself. Also, I stand almost no chance of composing any significant polyrhythmic material 'from my heart'. So how do I incorporate polyrhythmic aspects into my composition?
Take for granted that traditional knowledge of standard rhythmic maths is under my belt and that I'm never actually trying to compose by numbers, and that after I've constructed some polyrhythmic foundation I still always let loose with improvisational composition over the top of it. But how to compose-construct interesting polyrhythmic foundations?

This is an area where I (enjoyably) turn to theory support and software support.
There was a book published (maybe almost 10 years ago) called "The Geometry of Musical Rhythm - What Makes a Good Rhythm Good" by Godfried Toussaint. (see Libgen) It was the first place where I ever saw the idea of Euclidean Rhythms and I think it was that book which triggered the craze that emerged around Euclidean Rhythms.

If you didn't already succumb to the Euclidean Rhythms craze then It's well worth checking out.
What it might do for your melody writing is for you to have fun with.

There are now many examples of software packages that include a Euclidean Rhythms feature.
I'll refer to only an old example below that I still like a lot but I really recommended to look for it in lots of modern software too.

See (freely available) XronoMorph from https://www.dynamictonality.com/xronomorph.htm
Really recommended to explore the principles behind the software,
i.e., these extracts from their site...

• The mathematical principles utilized by XronoMorph are perfect balance and well-formedness (MOS).
• Perfect balance is a generalization of the polyrhythms found in many African and jazz musical traditions. A rhythm is perfectly balanced when the mean position (centre of gravity) of all its rhythmic events, when arranged on a circle, is the centre of that circle.
• Well-formedness is a generalization of the additive rhythms found in aksak (Balkan), sub-Saharan African, and progressive rock musical traditions. Well-formed rhythms contain no more than two interonset intervals, arranged as evenly as possible. WF rhythm are typically nested by faster WF rhythms, which in combination form complex interlocking rhythmic hierarchies.

These 3 videos are well worth watching
[1] XronoMorph: Well-Formed rhythms
[2] XronoMorph: Perfectly Balanced rhythms
[3] XronoMorph: An Introduction

[1] XronoMorph: Well-Formed rhythms

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7leRTbgXzI

[2] XronoMorph: Perfectly Balanced rhythms

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKcOOBGxzJc

[3] XronoMorph: An Introduction

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgzLRzIM8rc

====

Aside: at the same website where you can find XronoMorph - See the HEX editor - a great tool for exploring microtonality
My interested - but not so productive - encounter with HEX was here...
http://audiosex.pro/threads/a-vey-s...2tet-imposes-on-your-music.45473/#post-415269
https://audiosex.pro/threads/whats-your-philosophy-regarding-music-theory.51235/page-33#post-446601
Needless to say my excursions in microtonality are still totally limited to bending guitar strings.

 

Last edited: Oct 24, 2021

This information is REALLY great.

Indirectly through this creator, you have almost answered the thread question. Regardless of the best answer, which it may be, based on the contents of this thread we've all made comment on,... If and it is a big IF, the authors of XronoMorph applied one of their creations directly below to melody creation it would be the perfect answer to the thread author's question, simply because it would involve all the things he asked for without the chance of everything he stated he did not want being involved.
"Perfect balance: A novel principle for the construction of musical scales and meters"
(Their creation)

Add melody creation into that and problem solved. Because it is all done mathematically with the rhythmic patterns being seen as polygons within the circle, a similar approach could very easily be done with melody (Cycle/circle of fifths and rhythms for phrasing) to generate melodies that are either following a specified direction or a random one (to add to the ambiguity)
Thanks for this, I downloaded it and will enjoy what I find immensely I imagine.

P.S. While there are some melody making plugins and apps out there, some on the sister site even, they lack the one thing a musician would intuitively do when writing a melody. So they would possibly fulfil the TA's needs. Intuitively, however, when writing a melody you'd develop a form of voice-leading, where the melody would fragment itself or echo itself rhythmically and/or melodically as it harmonically shifts.

The random software while certainly AI clever, still lacks the human aspect that would naturally make a good writer pause and hear or think where the next phrase should or could be going. A perfect example is Autumn Leaves by Kosm / Prevert & Mercer. The first line into the II/V if you put it into an auto generator does nothing remotely like it or what might be considered good voice-leading.

 

Last edited: Oct 24, 2021

This one is better - you can customize the shape of the keys, the tuning, the mapping from ratios/frequencies to temperament, the ordering of pitches on the keyboard, you can even create own custom notation (with however letters you like) with microtonal accidentals (requires understanding some kind of Pythagorean based accidental system called Saggital https://sagittal.org/sagittal.pdf)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/xenharmonic-keyboard/9ppbl2brsk6z#activetab=pivot:overviewtab

 

That's great.
At least my crystal ball's OK - it predicted you would show us a better option for microtonal tools.

Back to ambiguity. When I saw this thumbnail image of one of the xenharmonic screenshots I thought I was looking at a graveyard with faces on tombstones. That might have been triggered by my memories of the pain my brain felt after my last attempted excursion into microtonal land.

 

Anyone who is not at least 60 years of age and only been playing and teaching microtonal music for 4-5 decades, would also still find some difficulty. I find it tough.
It is real headache material. To do it properly, you'd have forget everything you learned in even-tempered pitch and start from scratch, no matter how much has been learned.
Any person who has looked at microtones in tuning when doing MIDI knows that it is done in cents. Theoretically 100cents each side when split, i.e. sharp or flat.... The only thing I have ever used it for was to correct pitch that was slightly flat or sharp. In microtones.... that phrase of sharp or flat really does not exist. So yes it messes with your head. I admire you for trying though as I know you probably put a lot of time into attempting to understand it. I have not.

 

Two possible ways to play octatonic scale on these "tombstones" as if it is in just tuning (this temperament and layout is based on minor thirds).

 

And in this picture is what I think is the equivalent of pseudo-diatonic (actually, it is kind of chromatic) scale for this temperament.
In standard tonality we think of chromatic semitone as chroma, here we think of diatonic semitone as chroma (and when we modulate to the next tonality we change only one diatonic semitone), the harmonic motion and structure is based on... inverted triads (the same is valid for standard diminished and augmented scales in 12 ET). You can see that Pythagorean note names are not that useful since the notes with arrows are the actual "white keys" of the temperament. I am not sure whether the green or the yellow one is the equivalent to C major (the other one is the equivalent to C phrygian)

 

i am going to ambiguously thank you for linking that, by simultaneously cursing you for being complicit in potentially wasting hours of my time on unproductive frivolous geekery (fun?).

that is a real gem, with great implementation, for people who are interested in that sort of thing. goes way beyond a basic euclidean engine.

some highlights for me:
- ratios and golden sections in higher orders over the period, in the WF mode
- good implementation of the randomize functions -- musical and not OTT
- syncs well if you send it a clock

surprised how satisfying some more symmetrical patterns sound with maybe only one element going counter, especially with a bit of the randomization.

the expanded tonality stuff does not interest me, if anything i try to limit the tonal pallet (for clarity), but rhythm is still of primary importance in establishing embellishing, colouration tones, or interruption, suspension, deception, completion (cadential functions).

simple repetition and agogic methods are of primary importance in establishing intent. things can be done with tones but nothing says, "this is important", like rhythmic segmentation and placement.

"rhythm. for the purposes of development a rhythmic figure is of more value than a melodic one. a rhythmic figure is of more value than a melodic one. a rhythmic pattern repeated with the melody changed is more like the original than is a melody repeated with the rhythm changed." -- Melody Writing and Analysis: Annie Warburton

i am biased in my perspective. rhythm is a primary focus for me and i am a sucker for a great melody. i can forgive a musician almost anything but a poor sense of rhythm. good rhythmic sense is easily faked these days so it is essentially a 'live' phenomenon to tell how well a player syncs into a pocket.

 

Melodies without any rhythm are random notes as sure as a rhythm without a melody attached is a series of patterns without any melodic progression. As valid as Warburton is, the sum of the whole is and will always be the aim of any composer. Whether the rhythms, polyrhythms, counterpoint, harmonic content and more are the focus, or a melody they hummed and harmonised later no matter how simple or complex....etc....etc... Basically having a great rhythm pattern for the melody if the melody sucks is still a suck melody. Sure, the aim is great for both...you get my point though.
I totally agree by the way that the proof is always in the pudding, in this case seeing and hearing live, or in these times, sending someone a bed for them to do their part and they send it back with them playing a real instrument on it in under an hour as a standalone file/stem they can put into their DAW (easy to tell if real or not).
As one tiny example from multiple sources I could pull,

"In approaching a song sectionally, it could, in theory, be argued that to the degree that any section
of a song is “isolated” (somewhat independent of the rest of the music) or “highlighted” (more in the
foreground than in the middle or background of the music), the treatment of the individual parts
comprising that section will be isolated or highlighted, and that such treatment should be rendered
with a view to cohesion of the parts within the section, and cohesion of the section within the whole.
Put another way, this means that, to the extent that a section is isolated or highlighted, the ear will pick
up on how well the parts that comprise that section coalesce and work together to form it. And, since
in the end all of the sections need to work together, consideration should also be given to how well
that particular section fits in with all the others".

- John Collins, Counterpoint and how to use it in your music, P152.

 

Last edited: Oct 25, 2021

As a point polyrhythmically in this thread....I put this together fairly quickly ... the slow part was the DAW..
.. probably more useful for someone wanting to write purely for the art and not for entertainment for the masses. I could make it more interesting with more time, it was just an exercise.
The point is it is all well and good getting any machine to do it for you, but if you cannot do it without the machine or understand what the heck the machine is writing....then it's not really you is it.
Rhythms for me are the most awesome tool to find something new... but to write something musical? I do not consider this musical... But with no time limit I reckon I might find something useful. That said, rhythm is possibly my favourite tool for groove and swing and polyrhythms, but without melody... just rhythms.

Short description (audio created to match with drums tacet first 4 bars):
Clave/woodblock plays a 3:2 clave using 4 across 3 in a 3/4 bar
Congas play a tumbao 7 across a 3/4 bar ( a 16th triplet thrown in here and there for good measure).
Shaker/caixi plays a 5 across 3/4 bar
Bongos play a typical 8's pattern in 4/4 across a 3/4 bar
Drums play a simple 3/4 with ride bell on each upbeat



https://vocaroo.com/15tTleOTuPb4

 

Last edited: Oct 25, 2021

Thank you everyone who contributed to this, your shared knowledge is greatly appreciated. I had gone because someone was trolling this post.

I've got a ton of reading to do.

 

Last edited: Oct 25, 2021