Tamp It Down

I am always hunting for a balance between order and chaos in the music I create. The software I have been tweaking for the last several years always builds music from a sequence of measures of equal length. I can have many short measures or fewer long measures, but the measures in a single piece have the same length.

The measures are broken up into a rhythmic pattern of notes. The measures in a piece will often have a variety of patterns. In today's piece there are 8 different patterns for the measures. There are 216 measures in the piece. This piece introduces a new bit of code, which decides how to distribute the 8 patterns across the 216 measures. In the past, I used a sort of random walk. This new approach uses a recursive approach that provides a lot more repetition: a lot more order. The pattern sequence looks a bit like DDCDDCBDDCDDCBA.

Another source of increased order is how the rhythmic patterns are correlated between the voices. In the past, the random walks were independent between the voices. In the new code, the rhythmic patterns vary the same way in all the voices.

This piece is in 87edo, using a consonance function based on the primes 2, 3, 5, and 7: 87edo recurse.