For those who remember my last blog entry about the 15 ways of structuring rhythmical relationships to “keep it flowing”, you will find here – if you wish – a way to experience by yourself how these algorhythms get into touch with each other, by either following a script – what we may call composition – or by touching them on a screenplayer application over the Internet and let them rather enjoy a kind of free interactive ‘discussion’.
For those who don’t remember, or haven’t read the entry – no worries, as nothing will go wrong when playing with the algorhythms without knowing how to call or categorize them! You will simply recognize most of them simply by looking at them on the playing screen.
So what is left to offer you here?
One word about the idea of algorhythms.
Giving you access to 8 screenplayer settings with a short explanation how you can play with the sounds (hint: the current environment is just a first prototype and requires Google Chrome).
Giving you the links to the script versions of the 8 pieces, which form the Black Sonata I created a few years ago and which are based on the very same screens.
At the end, if you like to provide some feedback or engage with others to play even together, just leave a note and we may have some fun together.
What are ‘Algorhythms’?
To make it simple: Rhythms that employ continuous metric models such as various concurrent interpolations or stochastic methods can still be easy to grasp while listening, but hard to notate in a traditional score where non-continuous equidistant measures such as half, quarter and eighth notes prevail.
In order to define and adjust those rhythms with some comfort when creating them directly and without interfering through disturbing straight metrics, the use of algorithms which can bend metric relationships at will seems a good idea.
This is the reason, non-linear rhythms that are easier to formulate with those algorithms may be called algorhythms.
The Screenplayer
This application has been developed by my friend composer Heinz-Josef Florian and deploys 4 subscreens where preloaded sounds can be played by clicking or touching at different positions.
With selecting horizontal positions, the position within the displayed sound track can be chosen, while vertical positions allow to control the volume.
Additional functions include selecting alternate sound tracks (if there is a (+) symbol available), or to decide if the already playing window should be stopped when clicking into another window or rather should continue to play.
The application is quite self-explanatory and even so there is quite more to it and even more so in the future – at this stage, I thought it maybe already worth to get in touch with it to enjoy the possibilities that lie within the different sound track combinations of the various pre-prepared algorhythms.
Once you become a bit familiar with it, maybe you might want to get some inspiration for further exploration by listening to the “scripted versions” from the Black Sonata tracks themselves.
The Links
The following is the set of links to the 8 screenplayers with their adjacent Black Sonata pieces. Remember that the Black Sonata employs just black keys – so all the material is plain pentatonic and should be therefore really easy to mix.
Enjoy your first algorhythmic mixt(o)ures experience!
Here we go:
About algorithms and algorithmic composition in general
About rhythm in general
More information about the idea of the screenplayer can be found in The Magic E@r, chapter 4.6, "When sounds meet – just as people"