New Blog - Moving on to Studio Philharmonico

Dear friends,

A happy New Year 2024 to all of you!

This my music blog has slowly fallen asleep over time... I had a busy time in other aspects of my life, and i only did very little with regards to music. Therefore, no postings lately.

But with the beginning of 2024 I plan to refresh my musical activities. I am rebranding my music output "brand" now as "Studio Philharmonico". There is already a new website (still under construction) : www.studiophilharmonico.com  . 

And this blog will now close. Continuation of updates regarding my music will be here from now on:

https://studiophilharmonico.blogspot.com

And this blog will no longer get any updates.

See you soon on the new site!

My mobile music studio

In the past two years I have converted an LDV 400 Convoy (a minibus / van) into a campervan. And I have made provisions to use this as a mobile music studio, shown in this picture:

The keyboard is a Thomann SP-320, which also is a stand-alone piano. The tablet laptop computer is running the free Anvil Studio - it takes a bit practise to use it proficiently. Then there is a 20-year-old old Yamaha QY-70 MIDI synthesizer, which is connected to a pair of speakers. All the electronics is powered by a stabilized 12V power supply which smoothes out the power range that a vehicle 12V system can have.

Now I am able to make music on the road. Not while driving, though. :)

The Sugarwell Recordings

From December 2015 until June 2017 I lived in Sugarwell Court in Leeds.

The Sugarwell Court is a former tannery (known as Sugarwell Works or as Cliff Tannery) in the Meanwood section of Leeds. Since 1993 it is a set of student accommodation halls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarwell_Court.

I was able to rent there a furnished flat before moving to Germany in July 2017. Of course, the first thing after moving in was to set up my little music studio. And in January 2016 I began to create music renditions as usual. For the months of September until December 2015 I had not created any music renditions, due to holiday and then my moving out of Parkside Cottage. But now I had the leisure to resume musical activity. Therefore, I am calling the music which I created during this time at that location: Sugarwell Recordings.

Now for Christmas 2017 I did create a CD with some of these Sugarwell Recordings. Some of these have not been published yet, because they were created for a very specific project, about which I will provide information some time later.

I prepared this CD as a present for my friends and family - it is not available commercially. But if anyone wants to listen to some of the recordings made during the time when I lived in Sugarwell Court, these are available available online. The recordings of those compositions which are no longer copyrighted as compositions (70 years after composer's death) are available on my site at Bandcamp: https://virtualphilharmonic.bandcamp.com/. Other recordings are online on sites such as Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music and others.

There are a few other renditions which were created during my time in Sugarwell Court, among them most prominently Paul Hindemith's "Kleine Kammermusik fuer fuenf Blaeser". But that did unfortunately not fit on the CD... :(

New Album Online: "Digital Expressions" - Music of the Early 20th Century

I always wanted to publish my recordings of 20th century music, but there had been the big obstacle of copyright law: in order to be able to publish my recordings of this music, I would have to acquire individual mechanical licenses, if the composer is not yet dead for more than 70 years.

Now with LOUDR.fm it is possible to publish this music without upfront fee - the copyright royalties are taken from the proceeds after someone purchases the tracks.

So I have gone back to the music keyboard and have reworked a recording which I had already made back in 1999, when MP3.COM was active: "Symphonie Classique" by Serge Prokofieff. At that time in 1999 I actually did purchase a set of mechanical licenses. But it was difficult to keep track of the number of downloads, and so I removed my recording from online access.

But now with the simplified management of copyrighted music I wanted to put this work again online, and so I have re-worked and updated it with the Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 sample library. All four movements of the Symphonie Classique are now included in this new album.

Since there is quite a rigid pricing scheme by major online music distributors (iTunes seems to charge listeners £7.99 for music that is longer than 15 minutes) I decided that I need a full album, to give the listeners and prospective buyers more value for their spent money, if they would decide to purchase these recordings. So I added Kodaly's "Dances of Galanta" and Poulenc's "Organ Concerto" which I had already published earlier as singles. There are some very minor slight changes of these two recordings, compared to the earlier versions (which I kept available online for now). I also added two compositions by composers which are already in the public domain: Bartok's "Rhapsody for Violin #1" and Ravel's "Pavane for a dead princess", to provide even more value for the same price.

I called this new album "Digital Expressions", to reflect the expressive early 20th century musicality which is common in all these compositions.

Here is the album on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4dVAUlPuDbZecDOb863wxg

LOUDR.fm for Classical Music "Cover Songs"

Since several years I have published some of my music renditions on CD Baby, which has allowed me to bring this music to sites like iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and others, either as myself (e.g. iTunes, Amazon) or as Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra (e.g. iTunes, Amazon). I do like CD Baby because of the one flat fee that is to be paid when submitting music recordings for publication. No annual fee occurs, only a small fraction of the royalties is kept by CD Baby to cover expenses. This seemed to me more reasonable than paying an annual fee for the low number of listeners which my renditions attract. All these recording are either in public domain (composer dead for more than 70 years), or I hold the copyright on my own compositions.

A few weeks ago I found on the CD Baby a link to the LOUDR.fm service, and I was wondering what that was - so I checked it out. Turns out this is another music publishing site. It was recently acquired by CD Baby, hence the link to this competitor on their site. But LOUDR has one additional feature: it provides licensing for cover songs. This is a big deal: Finally I would be able to tap into the rich oevre of more recent composers such as Kodaly, Prokofiev and others. Licencing their music for my own "performance renditions" had been cumbersome: I would have to purchase a number of mechanical licenses ahead of the publication time and then would have to continuously track the downloads. I am also not sure if streaming would need a mechanical license. So all of this prevented me from publishing compositions by these copyrighted composers - really a pity. But LOUDR offers the capability of including a "cover" license for publishing such music. A "cover song" is any music which was written by a composer and is now performed by someone other than the composer. This terminology is of course more targeted towards popular music with its songs, but the principles also apply to classical music. Any music by a composer whose death occurred not more than 70 years ago is copyrighted, and any recording of this music requires a mechanical license. So I gave this music publication at LOUDR a try, and here are my experiences.

Excellent: Low Cost

LOUDR does not charge any up-front fee, which for an album at CD Baby is $49 (sometimes with a special offer reduced to $29). LOUDR also does not charge for the UPC code, which at other sites (e.g. CD Baby) costs $20. So this is a great upfront-savings. LOUDR charges a 15% fee of the purchase price for each sold track. If this is a cover song, the fee goes up: $0.091 for songs shorter than 5 minutes, and $0.0175 per minute for longer songs. This is then included in the fee that is subtracted from the revenue of each purchase. Details are given on their website. There are some additional fees for payment and for external sites, but in the examples given for a $10 album, the earnings paid out to the music creator are between $4.26 and $8.00 for each sold album. Since there is no up-front fee, there is also no pressure to create albums with many songs to make the best out of this fee. Instead one can opt to submit singles and therefore have more frequent releases.

Excellent: Attribution to Contributors

When entering the data for each track, LOUDR allows to specify a variety of contributors: arranger, composer, conductor, performer, remixer, soloist, vocal percussionist, and "featuring". This allows really to give appropriate credit to all contributors. For classical music it is especially relevant to distinguish between composer, conductor and performer. It is then also straightforward to indicate the original copyright holder (for classical music that is usually the composer).

Not so good: Classical Music Titles

Classical music faced always difficulties in the online music culture where in most cases the "artist" is the band/singer and the composer together. This is all ok when labelling for example the song "Yellow Submarine" by the Beatles: the title is clear, and the artist is "The Beatles". But indicating a classical music artist is more complex: there is the composer, then the performing orchestra and the conductor. Who should then be named as "the artist", as the meta data fields for online music require? There seems to be no real consensus - I have seen versions where "Smetana" is given as the artist for "The Moldau", but I have also seen this title as "Smetana: The Moldau" and then the artist would be the conductor - or the orchestra. To fight this chaos regarding the naming of classical music titles, the online music distributors such as Amazon, Spotify and Apple have apparently defined some standards on how such classical music track titles are to be named. One requirement is that the name of the composer should NOT be in the title.
This is all fine, but LOUDR has applied even more stringent requirements of the title. This is specified in their Style Guide which can be downloaded on their web site. This guide specifies for the track titles:

"Song titles must be formatted as
[Name of Work] in [Key], [Catalog Number]: [Movement Number]. [Movement Title]
For example:
Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67: I. Allegro con brio"

This is fine for most classical music before 1900. Newer music, however, often is not given with a key or a catalog number. If a title does not correspond to this strict scheme, LOUDR rejects it. I tried it with Zoltan Kodaly's "Dances of Galanta": I gave the correct original Hungarian title with translation: "Galántai táncok (Dances of Galánta)", without key and catalog number, as this is not shown in the score nor in any reference to this composition, but it was refused several times by the strict LOUDR upload system which seems to either operate automatically or is done just by someone screening for this specific required format. Only when finally someone from the support team responded to my request, then they did go ahead with the finalisation of the submission.
I would recommend that someone with a knowledge of the classical music repertoire would screen those titles and could then decide if the title is properly formatted. The current approach only adds unnecessary delays.

Customer Support, well...

LOUDR claims that their customer support would respond within 48 hours. But they appear to be overwhelmed, and I had to wait for responses to my emails a few days longer. They are very friendly and helpful, so I have no complaints there. But the long delay just adds to the whole publication process time. It may be also because the response is simply through email. CD Baby does have a similar approach via email, and I believe this adds to the delay time because email needs to be filtered for spam. I can imagine that their public email address gets a lot of spam mail, and therefore the processing of regular mails takes longer. I would suggest that they replace their email support system with a kind of forum with registration and login, to avoid the spam filter issues. Also they should have some support on weekends, to avoid that long backlog on Mondays coming from weekend-artists such as myself.

Overall this is a great and very promising site, and after the "Dances of Galanta" I have already another 20th century classical music treasure in the pipeline - hopefully the title issue will have been sorted out soon, because again this composition has no catalog number and therefore has already been rejected once ...

The emotional "meaning" of music intervals

When searching for some existing work which relates to the perception of musical intervals in the ears (and the brains) of listeners, I came across this publication:

Marco Costa, Pio Enrico Ricci Bitti and Luisa Bonfiglioli (2000), Psychological Connotations of Harmonic Music Intervals, in Psychology of Music, 28, pp. 4-22, April 2000.

The article is available online here at ResearchGate. In this article the authors (from the University of Bologna) are showing their investigations into the perception of musical intervals by listeners. While their own results are indeed very interesting, their paper shows also some other treasure of knowledge which I would like to share here. Apparently there have been earlier investigations into this matter on how to perceive musical intervals, a here are some of those results in a summary table.

Here is a table which summarizes some of the generally known "properties" of intervals:

Table 1: Musical intervals and their expressiveness

Interval name	Sample notes	Theoretical status	Expressive function (Cooke, 1959)	Expressive function (others)
minor second	C-C#	dissonance	Semitonal tension down to the tonic, in a minor context; spiritless anguish, context of finality	Dissonant, painful, uptight, afflicted, discouraged, humiliated
major second	C-D	dissonance	As a passing note, emotionally neutral. As a whole-tone tension down to the tonic in a major context, pleasurable longing, context of finality.	Dissonant, in suspense, tormented, sad, uptight, eager, pleasant
minor third	C-E♭	imperfect consonance	Concord, but a "depression" of natural third: stoic, acceptance, tragedy.	Painful, severe, languid, sweet, melancholy, frank, still, submitted
major third	C-E	imperfect consonance	Concord, natural third: joy.	Sonorous, Joyous, furious, strong, cheerful, pleasant, happy, right, pure, quiet, stable, shining
perfect fourth	C-F	perfect consonance	As a passing note emotionally neutral. As a semitonal tension down to the minor third pathos.	Lugubrious, active, tense
augmented fourth (tritonus)	C-F#	dissonance	As a modulating note to the dominant key active aspiration. As "augmented fourth" pure and simple devilish and inimical forces.	Hostile, averse, destructive, misterious
perfect fifth	C-G	perfect consonance	Emotionally neutral, contrxt of flux, intermediacy.	Consonant, pleasurable, stimulating, gentle, acrimonious, healthy, agreeable
minor sixth	C-G#	imperfect consonance	Semitonal tension down to the dominant, in a minor context: active anguish in a context of flux.	Pleasant, consonant, painful, discontended, strained, distressing, active, unstable
major sixth	C-A	imperfect consonance	As a passing note: emotionally neutral. As a whole tone tension down to the dominant, in a major context: pleasurable longing in a context of flux.	Pleasant, consonant, unstable, sweet, desirous, bright, tense
minor seventh	C-B♭	dissonance	Semitonal tension down to major sixth, or whole-tone tension down to minor sixth, both unsatisfactory, resolvign again down to the dominant: "lost" note, mournfulness	Dissonant, sad, painful, empty, melancholy, severe, strained, bewildered, lugubrious, unsatistied
major seventh	C-B	dissonance	As a passing note emotionally neutral. As a semitonal tension up to the tonic, violent longing, aspiration in a context of finality	Dissonant, tense, bitter, disagreeable, gloomy, optimistic
octave	C-c	perfect consonance		Consonant, easy, solemn, majestic, strong, severe, full, stable, energetic

Here are the relevant literature references, as given by Costa et al.:
D. Cooke (1959). The language of music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Others:
N. Castiglioni (1959). Il linguaggio musicale dal Rinascimento ad oggi. Milano: Ricordi
G. Galilei (1638). Dialoghi intorno a due nuove scienze. In G. Galilei Opera Omnia (vol VIII), 1966, Firenze: Biblioteca Nazionale
C. Gervasoni (1800). La scuola della musica in tre parti divisa. Piacenza: Niccolo Orcessi.
P. Gianelli (1801). Grammatica ragionata della musica, ossia nuovo metodo facile di apprendere a ben suonare e cantare. Venezia: A.Santini
J.J. Rousseau (1782). Dictionnaire de musique. Aux Deux-Ponts: Chez Sanson et Compagnie.
R. Steiner (1975). Wesen des Musikalischen und das Tonerlebnis im Menschen. Dornoch: Rudolf Steiner Verlag
G. Tartini (1754). Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienzia dell' armonia. Padova: Giovanni Manfre Editore.


In 1940 Edgar Willems has investigated this perception a bit more - here are his results:

Table 2: Expressive values of musical intervals according to Willems (1940)

Interval	Sensorial	Affective	Intellective
unisonous	fusion, smoothness	will, peace	insistence, serenity
minor second	derangement, roughness	fear, anger	shyness, illness
major second	movement, friction	wish, vulgarity	request, displeasure
minor third	heaviness, shadow	sadness, pain	lament, discouragement
major third	clearness, limpid	joy, happiness	hope, balance
perfect fourth	hardness, cold	firmness, indifference	achievement, simplicity
augmented fourth (tritonus, 45:32)	fracture, heat	disdain, excitement	pretension, surprise
diminished Fifth (tritonus, 64:45)	excitement, instability	restlessness, anxiety	doubt, uncertainty
perfect fifth	balance, emptiness	love, calm	certainty, mastery
minor sixth	upsetting, penumbra	suffer, melancholy	worry, pity
major sixth	radiant, light	effusiveness, kindness	satisfaction, gratification
minor seventh	dynamic, warmth	exaltation, love	lyricism, romanticism
major seventh	limitation, wound	wickedness, hate	pride, rebellion
octave	solid, stable	courage, exaltation	heroism, liberation

Edgar Willems (1940). L'Oreille musicale. T. I. La préparation auditive de l'enfant. Avant-propos de E. Jaques Dalcroze. II. La culture auditive. Les intervalles et les accords. Avant-propos de H. Gagnebin Reliure inconnue – 1940 available at Amazon France


These are very interesting attributes, which seem to correlate with my own perception of musical intervals. It would now be interesting if these attributes are dependent on the absolute pitch. I have not found any investigation which looked at this aspect.

Béla Bartók: Rhapsody No.1 (1928). "Lassu" and "Friss"

Today, on 25 March 2015, is Bela Bartok's 134th birthday. Not a "round" number, but still reason to celebrate him with his music.

I have completed now the recording of Bartok's "Rhapsody No.1", with both movements "Lassu" and "Friss". This is the version for violin and orchestra. Originally this composition was written by Bartok for piano and violin, but he transcribed it for orchestra and violin in 1929.

Already in 2001 I had created a rendition of "Lassu", at that time with my Yamaha MU-80 synthesizer and a viola soundfont. In 2014 I did revise this recording of "Lassu", using the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 (GPO4) sample library for a more realistically sounding rendition. And now, in March 2015 I have tackled the 2nd movement, "Friss".

Both movements rely heavily on solo violin, which is a bit problematic to "play" on a regular piano keyboard. For this recording I have played this solo violin voice in live play, so that I could convey the varying tempi and attacks. I did use the "solo violin 1" (Stradivari) sample for this voice. In "Friss" there are also parts where the string sections are to be played by a few solo instruments, so I did use all of the other solo instruments from the GPO4 library.

The cimbalom used here is a standard Cakewalk TTS softsynth from Sonar.


Here is now the completed recording of Rhapsody No.1. After the first movement, the 2nd one will play automatically.



The recording was created in Sonar Producer X1. It uses 3 instances of the ARIA player, with a total of 32 individual MIDI tracks and instruments.

There are two different possible endings in "Friss". I chose the one which is supposed to be used when both movements are played. Since "Friss" can also be played as a stand-alone movement without "Lassu", there is a different ending of "Friss" which does not refer in the end back to "Lassu".



Here is an encore: Béla Bartók on the piano, and violinist Josef Szigeti, for whom this composition was written, in a historic recording from 13 April 1940:



In this recording, apparently the second version of the "Friss" ending was used, even though both movements are played in sequence together.

"Im Märzen der Bauer..."

The beginning of spring in the month or March is a good opportunity to play the old folk song (Volkslied) from Moravia "Im Märzen der Bauer" ("In March the Farmer...").



This song describes the activities of farmers at the beginning of spring and then (in the final verse) throughout the year. It is most often played/sung with 3 verses, but there is also a version with an additional inserted after the first verse, as shown on the Lieder-website Ingeb.org.

1. Im Märzen der Bauer die Rößlein einspannt;
Er bringt seine Felder und Wiesen instand, 
Er ackert, er egget, er pflüget und sät
Und regt seine Hände gar früh und noch spät.

a. Den Rechen, den Spaten, den nimmt er zur Hand
und setzet die Wiesen in ebenen Stand. 
Auch pfropft er die Bäume mit edlerem Reis
Und spart weder Arbeit noch Mühe und Fleiß.

2. Die Knechte und Mägde und all sein Gesind,
Das regt und bewegt sich wie er so geschwind.
Sie singen manch munteres, fröhliches Lied
Und freu'n sich von Herzen, wenn alles schön blüht.

3. Und ist dann der Frühling und Sommer vorbei,
So füllet die Scheuer der Herbst wieder neu.
Und ist voll die Scheuer, voll Keller und Haus,
Dann gibt's auch im Winter manch fröhlichen Schmaus.

Here is a translation into English (which can be sung to this melody and which also rhymes) by my friend David Solomons, who has sung the German version of this song to am earlier version of my recording (from 2003), which is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxbYSzxd8GM.

1. In March comes the farmer to harness his team. 
He makes his fields ready as well he may deem.
He ploughs and he harrows and sows all his seeds.
From dawn up to dusk then to labour he needs.

a. He takes up the rake and the spade in his hand
And levels the meadows he has on his land.
He also grafts new twigs onto his fine trees. 
It takes all his effort, his work doesn't cease.

2. The farmhands and maids and his workers all there.
Keep busy as he does his work for to share.
They sing lots of songs that are merry and bright
And when all is blooming it gives them delight.

3. Now when the spring season and summer are past.
The autumn will fill his great barn then at last.
And once barn and cellar and house are well filled.
There is jolly feasting when winter has chilled.

© David Solomons 2012.


This web site also provides the following interesting information about this song:

"Bauernlied" im "Liederbuch für die Deutschen in Österreich", 1. u. unveränderte 2. Aufl., Wien 1884. Der Herausgeber Josef Pommer fügte hinzu: "Ein von der deutschen Landbevölkerung der mährischen Sudeten häufig gesungenes und beliebtes Volkslied. Eingesandt (zwischen 1882 u. 1884)."

Looking at this time frame and the location, this is a song which very likely composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) heard in his youth, when he grew up in Iglau (Jihlava) at the border between Bohemia and Moravia. In my arrangement and the composition of the interludes between the verses I hinted at this connection by adding some "Mahlerian"-type harmonies and progressions.

I have created the first version of this arrangement in 2002/2001. Now I have reworked it and re-recorded it in Februaryh 2015. This new recording uses Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 (strings and a solo flute).

"A fairly ordinary working day" - composition for string quartet

In summer 2012 the Crossover Composition Award was organised, asking for a composition for two violins. So I sat down and wrote a 5 minute composition for two violins. There were great other contributions to this competition, and my composition was not awarded anything.

After the composition was sitting for a while on the metaphorical shelves, I decided to extend it into a string quartet. So in February 2015 I added a viola and a cello voice, changed a few notes in the violin parts, and recorded the quartet again with the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 sample library.

The result is here on SoundCloud:
http://soundcloud.com/reinhold-behringer/a-fairly-ordinary-working-day-for-string-quartet.

About the composition:

The music follows a program: a typical ordinary working day at the office. It starts out with night, sunrise, awakening, then some morning hectic. Rush hour traffic, fast cars, people running upstairs and downstairs. Then at work. Boring routine job. Daydreaming. Trouble with the boss. The day does not seem to end. Finally the work is over. Rush hour on the way home. Partying. Night.

The exact correspondences of these notions to the music are shown in my synchronous comments that appear when the music is played. I did try to put these notions directly into music, quite literally translating the mood and motion into musical elements.

I hope that you enjoy this music!

Delian Suite #8 - a collaborative music composition project

The "Delian Society" is currently working on a composition which involves several composers: The "Delian Suite #8" has several movements, each of which is one minute long and is composed by a different composer, as a letter to a person of the past. This is currently work in progress, but the preliminary site is already up. This suite will be performed in 2015 by the Octava Chamber Orchestra.
I am very glad that I have the opportunity to take part in this project with my own little composition "Letter to Ada Lovelace".

"Romantic Suite"

In 2001 I wrote this three-part suite for orchestra. It has the movements "Mirage", "Cheeky", and "Never Ending". "Mirage" is for full orchestra and piano, "Cheeky" is for piano with strings and a few woodwinds, and "Never Ending" is for string orchestra, harp, and two solo violas.

The first rendition was created in 2001, using a Yamaha MU-80 synthesizer and a few soundfonts. This new recording from November 2013 is based on the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. The music is available at BandCamp.

Visualisation Video of Debussy's Nuages - by Stephen Malinowski

Stephen Malinowski has visualised my recording of Claude Debussy's "Nuages":



This is in principle a piano roll plot, but with much more sophisticated iconography, giving a deep insight into the musical structure over time, showing instrumentation, harmonies, and tonality.

On his website "The Music Animation Machine" he explains the process of creating these visualisations. He has many more music recordings visualised in similar ways, and his videos are on several YouTube channels:

smalin
musanim
musanim3D
stephenmalinowski
Stephen Malinowski

Website Maintenance - all music tracks now streamed for free

After a longer period of inactivity I had a look at my main website www.virtualphilharmonic.co.uk, only to notice that many of my music streams did not work anymore. Some settings on the Indaba website where I am currently hosting most of my music, had changed, and as a consequence, several of my music recordings were not playing anymore.

I fixed this now: each of the tracks which are listed here have now a full length streaming widget from the Indaba site. I got rid of the "partial play" which only played a random 30 sec clip, even though many of these tracks can also be purchased on iTunes / Amazon.

I think that it is more valuable that people have the opportunity to listen to what I am creating (or trying to create), than "enforcing" the purchase of my music on commercial sites. Therefore, all my music is from now on available for free on my site.

These Indaba streaming widgets appear to use Flash. Unfortunately they do not seem to run on any mobile phone... There is the "additional MP3 player" which uses HTML5, but that appears to work somewhat unreliable, as the files are on my very slow server.

In the future I may not use Indaba anymore and instead use my site on BandCamp. They offer widgets which work greatly on any mobile platform, and I like their model of voluntary payment. On this site I already have placed the complete "Ma Mere L'Oye" by Ravel, and my very latest rendition: From Mahler's Symphony #6 the "Andante Moderato". I have just posted that one also on my main site, as the first one that only links to the player on BandCamp.

Tchaikovsky: February - Carnival

A few days ago I completed the orchestra transcription of the second piece from Tchaikovsky's Suite "The Seasons", "February - Carnival". My method for transcribing is as follows: First I record the piano version with sequencer software. Then in the piano roll view I select notes to be copied into appropriate instrument tracks. I did use all the notes in the piano score and let it be played by at least one instrument group. Also, I did not add any notes, except some octave-doubling in the bass and a triangle in the middle part.

Tchaikovsky: January - At the Fireside

Tchaikovsky wrote the 12 pieces "The Seasons" for piano solo. However, they lend themselves very well for orchestration, and several composers and musicians transcribed these pieces for orchestra (read more on Wikipedia).

In 2001 I began my own transcription of these pieces, but I only managed to complete "January". Now, in 2013, I again have resumed working on transcribing these nice little music pieces, and I have revised my transcription of the first one, "January", with the use of Garritan Personal Orchestra samples.

The result is here:


For non-flash systems this link may work: www.indabamusic.com/asset/show/1995252

"5. Forum Medientechnik" at FH St.Poelten (Austria) - Keynote

On Thursday, 22.November 2012 I will give a keynote presentation at the "Forum Medientechnik", organised by the FH St.Poelten (Austria) about my work on orchestral renditions using sequencers, instrument sample libraries, and synthesizers. The talk (given in German) titled "The Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra - Produktion klassischer Orchestermusik am Computer" will cover the fundamental techniques applied in creating such renditions with simple and affordable technology means at home. It will feature the Prelude (1st movement) of Maurice Ravel's orchestral version of "Le Tombeau de Couperin", which will be used to illustrate the application of various techniques for making such renditions "musical".

The website of this conference is at http://fmt2012.fhstp.ac.at/

Mahler: "Resurrection", 1st Movement

Today, 18.May 2012, is the 101st anniversary of Gustav Mahler's death. Just in time for this commemoration I was able to complete my rendition of the first movement of Symphony #2. This has been my most ambitious project so far: it requires 66 independent instrument tracks in the sequencer, and it almost brings my audio system to its knees, with an occasional glitch in the audio engine. But the recording could be created ok.

The image to the left is a painting by artist Paula Arciniega. She has created a whole series of paintings, inspired by Mahler's symphonies, and I find that these express his music very well. The one shown here is the painting which relates to Symphony #2.

My recording if the first movement is on my website, but for direct access it can be also played through the player below. I plan to continue working on this symphony, but it will take a while until I have it completed.

2D Fourier Transform on Music

For a long time, I have thought about what to do to visualize music. The need for this comes when posting music recordings onto YouTube, which is a very nice platform for distributing music. Just showing a black screen does not really do justice to the visual medium, and so one has to think on what to put there to the music. Many music pieces have there a still image, or a collection of images which are relevant to the music. This is fine, but does not use fully the possibilities which video is offering. Ideally, one would have a video that is tightly synchronized to the music and complements the acoustic impression with a visual one - as it is done in popular music videos, since the time MTV has pushed this forward ("video killed the radio star" comes to mind). But for classical music there is really not very much in terms of appropriate music visualizations: there are videos of the performers, there are those series of smartly arranged still images, but rarely is there a video which truly complements the audio and the music in terms of visualizing directly the music and its elements.

In the past there has been some work on this, and I am especially fascinated by the work that Oskar Fischinger has done in the 1920-40s. Sometimes a few of his films have been shown on Turner Classic Movies in between regular movies. He really tried to take music and visualize it with abstract shapes which represent the music.

On most mediaplayers, there are automatic visualization tools which show some automatically generated animations, based on the music audio. However, I have never found a satisfying visualizer, because most of the visualizations appear to be some random motions, on top of a bit of wave analysis.

That kept me thinking, and then in December 2011 I had the idea to use the Fourier Transform to detect periodicities in music. The Fourier Transform (FT) is a well known approach for analyzing audio: it is generally used to create spectrograms and show the frequency content in music. FT detects periodicities in signals, and this is usually used to detect the frequencies which are present in an acoustic signal. Music is based on such frequencies, which relate to musical notes. But music has also "slower" periodicities", not related to the high frequency of sound (>20 Hz), but related to the measures and the beat in music. So I decided to apply the FT on music with a larger window: for a sound spectrum, the FT is usually applied for a time window of 100 ms. But for revealing longer-period periodicities in music, I would apply the FT for a time window of several seconds.

To make the computations easier, I decided to not use the sound wave itself, but the abstract notation of music as input. This is a series of discrete note events, which have pitch and volume. In music sequencers, the notes are usually shown on a piano plot roll, which has as horizontal axis the time, and as vertical axis the pitch resp. the note frequency. A FT can be applied on this piano plot roll, using the 2-dimensional approach for FT that is used in image processing (noise reduction, feature detection).

The figure to the left here shows the 2D Fourier Transform of the piano roll plot of Gustav Mahler's "Urlicht" (4th movement of Symphony No.2). In this plot, the horizontal axis shows spatial frequencies of the rhythm and the beat distribution. The vertical axis indicates the distribution of intervals and chords. There are clearly some peaks to be seen, which indicate predominant intervals in this music. Most of the relevant data are around the central axis (x=0) in the FT plot, which is the axis with small rhythm elements, indicating long notes (or pauses). Along this central vertical axis, the musical chord and interval elements can be seen as distinct points or regions.

This 2D FT can be re-transformed back into a piano roll plot, by again applying the Fourier Transform algorithm. I have tried this, and indeed it comes out correctly. However, this back-transformation also needs the phase of the FT (something that is also numerically computed as part of the transformation, using complex numbers). If this phase is not present, then the resulting piano plot roll is overlaid with its mirror image, due to symmetry. It would be quite beneficial to find a way to remove this mirror image, without using the phase of the FT. Then, the inverse transformation could be used to edit the music in its Fourier space. This would provide completely new ways of creating music.

Overall I think that this 2D FT has quite a significance for music: it is invariant to pitch and tempo (at least if the music time is used as reference, instead of real time), and this can lead to unique fingerprinting of music or musical phrases, which can be used for identifying music. Also, it can provide new ways of creating music by editing its Fourier Transform. And last but not least, I have found a new way of visualizing music. At least, the FT algorithm provides a new dataset (2D array) as a basis for an interesting visualization that directly represents the musical content.

I have published this approach recently at the Music, Mind, Invention workshop in Ewing, NJ. The officially published paper for this is here, and the presentation which I gave is here, although that presentation does not have me speaking, so it may be a bit hard to understand the context and background.

I plan to develop this further, make a few videos with this approach as visual accompaniment of my music, and I will work towards releasing the software as a toolkit so that it can be used by others. Lots of work to do then.

Opening of Workshop "Music, Mind, Invention"

At the evening before the workshop "Music, Mind, Invention" began (held at The College of New Jersey in Ewing), a concert was given in the Center for the Arts, where pianist Joanna Chao performed music by mostly contemporary composers. Here is the program she played:

Joshua Fineberg: "Tremors" (1997)
J.S.Bach: Aria to Goldberg Variations
Fred Lerdahl (2004, 2009): "Three Diatonic Studies", with the movements "Chasing Goldberg", "Cyclic Descent", and "Scalar Rhythms"
Robert Young McMahan: From the "Six Miniatures for Piano" (2011-12) the first two: "Andante" and "Crisp, Strident". This was a world premiere.
Joshua Fineberg: "Veils" (2001)

A very appropriate opening of the workshop, followed by a reception with the opportunity to chat with the participants.

Ravel's "Ma mère l'oye" (Mother Goose) recorded by VPO

Maurice Ravel's orchestral suite "Ma mère l'oye" (Mother Goose) is based on children's stories. It was first written as a piece for piano, but Ravel later created an orchestral version. There is a long orchestral version which was intended as a ballet music, and there is a shorter suite in 5 movements. I have dedicated the past month to work on the latter 5-movement suite and have created a rendition with the Garritan Personal Orchestra samples. Work on this suite was not easy: although the instrumentation is set much lighter than for example a Gustav Mahler symphony, there are several technical difficulties in it: the strings have many parts with fast notes, 1/32 and 1/64. Overall, the instruments need to be played very light-hearted, to keep that airy feel of the music. There are several wind solo instruments which need to be played "with emotion". There is lots of flagolet in the strings, and some of the instruments appear to exceed their natural range (or is this just sloppiness of the editors at Durand, who did not properly assign the right instruments?).

The recordings of all five movements of this suite are now complete, and I have bundled this suite with another suite by Maurice Ravel: "Le Tombeau de Couperin" into the album "Maurice Ravel - Vol.One". My recording of the Le Tombeau suite had already been completed in November 2011, but its 20 minutes duration was too short for a full album.

Since a few days this album has become available on the commercial music outlets. This time Spotify was first, followed by iTunes a few days later. I am now waiting for the album to appear on Amazon.