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Tutorial
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Score 101 - Combining notes,
phrases and chords. |
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The SCScore class provides a
temporal container for notes, phrases, chords, and callbacks. Objects
are added to the score at a particular start time (in beats per minute)
and the score can be played or looped as required.
Scores allow for the construction of complex musical sections. Several
scores can be created if desired, and callbacks could be used to
trigger a sequence of scores allowing for a flexible
structuring of musical works.
This example is quite extensive and demonstrates a number of
algorithmic music techniques as well as how to add things to a score,
so it may be worth a close inspection. In essence, how to add notes to
a score is covered in the first 5 lines, but that would be a pretty
boring score to listen to :)
After importing the SoundCipher libaray a new SCScore object is
created. Notice that unlike most other tutorial examples that use the
immediate playback functions of the SoundCipher class (such as
playNote), this program does not need to instantiate a SoundCipher
object.
For musical purposes a pitch class set, called pitches, is established
as an array. It is used for constructing the pitched material in latter
sections.
The kick drum section shows a simple way of adding notes to a score.
The arguments to addNote are:
score.addNote(startTime, channel, instrument,
pitch, dynamic, duration, articulation, pan);
The hi hats section also uses addNote() inside a for-loop as an
convenient way to add many notes. Notice that the drum sounds are on
MIDI channel 9. The cosine function for dynamic looks a bit complicated
but is a neat trick to vary the dyanmic of each note programatically.
The bass section shows how to add a phrase to the score. It has to be
acknowledged that this is a bit cumbersome given all the arrays of
paramters, but when more or longer phases are implemented the ratio of
lines of code to number of notes created starts to get better - in this
example we only produce a phrase of 4 notes. The if-statement inside
the for-loop is a neat way to ensure that the downbeat is treated
differently to other beats which is often useful musically.
The piano section constructs a chord from the pitch class set and adds
it to the score a couple of times.
Finally the score is played with 3 repeats.
Because of the heavy use of randomness in this example it is worth
refreshing the page to restart the applet and hear how this code
produces a variety of generated scores. |
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