Author Archives: amateurmusicology
A Postmodern Drum Machine
“How does time function in postmodern music? Postmodernism is profoundly temporal, but it uses, rather than submits to time. Its music shapes time, manipulates time. Time, like tonal sounds and diatonic tunes and rhythmic regularity and textual unity, becomes no … Continue reading
Silence, Chance, Cage, Code
“Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.” ~ Stéphane Mallarmé, 1897 John Cage is well known as the composer who formalized the use of silence as a compositional element on par with any other note or sound. He was … Continue reading
Musical Circuits @ KNOBCON 2016
Experimental Music: Composition with an Arduino MIDI Controller Knobcon Chicagoland, September 2016 With an Arduino, a breadboard, and a handful of parts, you can build a MIDI controller that works as a sequencer or a classic beatbox. But the same … Continue reading
Binary Beethoven: Coding a Musical Idea
The first four ominous notes of the Fifth Symphony are well known: da-da-da-dum! That musical idea seems so obvious now, but think just for a moment about how radical it was and is. First, this is a symphony that doesn’t … Continue reading
A Musical Stylus for the World’s Simplest Oscillator
“Rule #17: If it sounds good and doesn’t smoke, don’t worry if you don’t understand it.” ~ Nicholas Collins, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking, Second Edition, Routledge, 2009, p. 144. Collins describes it as the “world’s simplest … Continue reading
Arduino MIDI Circuits
“What really makes an instrument musical is that a musician decides to make use of it.” ~ Allen Strange, Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls (2nd Edition, 1983, p. 2). This post documents two circuits connecting an Arduino to electronic … Continue reading
Arduino and Midi for Beginners
This is a brief introduction to the Arduino, MIDI, and how the Arduino can be used to communicate musical messages. This guide is not a tutorial. This guide provides a quick, concise explanation of these technologies and links to some … Continue reading
