Alex McLean

Making music with text

Category Archives: music

MSc Thesis: Improvising with Synthesised Vocables, with Analysis Towards Computational Creativity

by Alex on December 10, 2007

My MSc thesis is here. The reader may find many loose ends, which may well get tied up through my PhD research. Abstract: In the context of the live coding of music and computational creativity, literature examining perceptual relationships between text, speech and instrumental sounds are surveyed, including the use of vocable words in music. [...]

ASCII Rave in Haskell

by Alex on August 8, 2007

I’ve been playing with using words to control the articulation of a physical modelling synthesiser based on the elegant Karplus-Strong algorithm. The idea is to be able to make instrumental sounds by typing onomatopoeic words. (extra explanation added in the comments) Here’s my first ever go at playing with it: ASCII Rave in Haskell For [...]

Canntaireachd for sinewaves

by Alex on April 10, 2007

An early sketch of a system of vocables for describing manipulations of a sine wave. The text is a bit small there, it’s better in the original avi version. Vowels give pitch, and consonants give movements between pitches. Inspired by the notation of canntaireachd. Made with hsc (Haskell client for scsynth). As ever, code available [...]

Peano curve weaves of whole songs

by Alex on December 27, 2006

Some nine months ago I played with weaving images from music, including using a peano curve as a mapping. I’ve returned to this subject, having many good ideas to explore from recent discussions with Tim Blackwell. We thought rendering some whole songs would work nicely. I didn’t fancy playing with my Java code again so [...]