And then that reminded me of an entirely different piece of music, a song I wrote and recorded last year but never posted as it's a bit different from what I usually throw up here. Today is a day for different things, so here it is.
The problem with it is that it's not really its own thing; it's got a melody partly stolen from the middle of another little piece of mine, and a lot of the chords are also from a different piece I've been working on. But different elements of different things tend to jumble together in my head and get stuck together, so there it is.
— posted
Saturday, February 05, 2011 at 09:56PM EST
I've been posting a lot of mathematics-related things recently, so I thought it was high time that I posted some music. I've been working on a few different music projects recently, but in the mean time here's a new song.
It's not a genre that I've posted before on this site, but I find a large part of my creativity comes from working with a large variety of subjects, mediums, and styles.
The trouble with being a composer is that I always hope some day I will be able to play these pieces perfectly, so that you can hear exactly what I was trying to get at, but that day never comes and I eventually get bored of the piece and stop playing it altogether, which only makes things worse. But I would rather get out an imperfect recording than none at all, and I will trust you to forgive my mistakes.
Paper Instruments: Studio Recordings and Burning
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Awesome things about paper instruments: easy and cheap to make, readily available materials, lightweight, recyclable, and quite flammable. Playing instruments while they are on fire is not something I can legally recommend to you—it is as dangerous as art itself. Luckily, we are the world experts on playing burning paper instruments, and with proper precautions had an incredible experience. Video footage to come.
Before we burned all the instruments, I made some studio recordings. Here are three short pieces for paperwinds and paper tube xylophone:
Symmetry is a common tool in composition, but no one has thoroughly studied all symmetry patterns that are possible in music... until now! “Symmetry and Transformations in the Musical Plane” will appear in the proceedings of BRIDGES 2009, and I'll be in Banff this summer to present it.
Related to this paper is a seven-movement piece in which each movement is inspired by and contains the symmetry of each of the seven frieze patterns. The piece will ultimately be a piano trio, but three movements of the piano sketch are now available:
I was recently commissioned to write the title music for the video game Altitude, a fun multiplayer 2D shooter which you can download for free. The game is still in beta, but it features my music during the opening screens. You can also listen to the title music directly:
A commission like this is a collaboration between the game designer and composer, and we have to work together to get the feel of the music to be just what the game designer envisions. The first draft of the music contained three different ideas I was playing around with. We ended up going with something more serious, but you might enjoy listening to the original:
Last night was the paper instrument premier of The Sound of Paper at the Art Cézar gallery! We played a few short pieces, two of which you can hear live concert recordings of now:
A piece for two dueling paper didgeridoos, paper tube harp, paper drum, and--unintentionally--dog.
Here's a picture of the band rehearsing. From left to right: Frank Maes on paper drum, a blurry Hendrik Goris playing the paper xylophone faster than the eye can see, myself adjusting a paper slide-flute (note that the skirt is made of paper as well), and Stefan Langerman on the paper hand-flute. In the corner you can see the two black tubes of the tube bass, and most of the giant didgeritube.
So you can get an idea of the theatrics behind the didgeriduel, here is Stefan with the giant didgeridoo which extended into the audience (it is not at full length in this picture), and myself with a comparatively small didge.
Here is Hendrik playing the tube harp. Like the paper xylophone, the pitches can be adjusted easily by changing the lengths of the tubes.
One of my current composition projects is a seven-movement piano trio with
one movement inspired by each of the seven possible
geometric frieze patterns.
I've written piano sketches of the first two movements,
and I thought I'd share them with you here:
Nothing Has Changed is a new composition available in Music. This is a rough recording that I made the same day that I finished writing the piece, so it has that unpracticed hot-off-the-press charm. (edit: this recording has now been updated)
![[Vi Hart logo]](/images/butterfly_small.png)
Click to play (3 min 38 sec)
