Note-worthy

[theblackalchemist]

Note-worthy

he hallmark of a good musician is his ability to take a musical piece and interpret it in his own way. It’s why good cover versions do not sound exactly like the original. They seem fresh – renewing public interest, yet retaining the flavour of the old favourite.

 

Imagine a concert hall and a stage, with a symphony orchestra that’s performing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth symphony.

 

Imagine, the composer himself (whom we’ll pretend is not deaf), strolling around between the orchestra members on the stage.

 

Wielding a hybrid between a laptop and a sound generator, the composer soaks up the different tones, processes them, and sends them back in ever-changing variations.

 

Ode to Joy is digitised, and improvised upon. The symphony is completely altered – but at the same time, the basic theme is instantly recognisable.

 

INFINITE VARIATIONS

 

The device that will let a contemporary Beethoven improvise and produce variations in real time has been created by 36-year-old Øyvind Brandtsegg, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, as part of his PhD research.

 

Brandtsegg is a composer, a musician and computer programmer. He plays the Marimba Lumina, a percussion instrument that has been electronically modified so that the player can alter the sound by the way he or she strikes the instrument.

 

For his research, he invented the new type of sound generator: A particle synthesiser.

 

The device takes a stanza – a guitar riff, a verse line, a drum solo, or any recorded sound – and splits the sound into a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds.

 

These fragments are then infinitely reshuffled, enabling one to vary the music without any change in the fundamental theme.

 

“It’s easy to change a bit of music into something that can’t be recognised. It’s the opposite that is the challenge: to create variations in which the musical theme remains clear,” Brandtsegg said.

 

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