Re: Rhythmic Randomness vs. Melodic Randomness

["Matt Davignon" <mattdavignon@gmail.com>]

I think I know what he means - the process of looping random
percussive sounds (such as someone dropping coins non-rhythmically).
That's something I did frequently when I was new to looping - I was
entranced by the idea that repetition "makes anything into music".
Eventually I started running into dead ends with it - if I just let it
repeat, it sounded obviously redundant. If I tried to to use other
random elements as a "fill", then it would sound too random and
non-musical.

There are still lots of interesting things to do with the idea. I'm a
little more used to working with previously generated material than I
am to generating material from scratch. A pattern generated from
randomness often can provide a good launching point. Then, with
conscious decisions made after that you get to add some personality to
something which originally had none.

Part of using randomness is scanning for musical elements, and
learning how to productively bring them out. For example, a slightly
more advanced version of the "looping random sound" would be to record
the output of a cd player while tapping the "cue" and "rewind"
buttons. Then go back, slow down the recording, and listen for
patterns to turn into loops. I think that's what Oval did for their
"94Diskont" cd.

Another fun thing to do is set up your drum machine to compose a loop,
and set the timing correction to 1/8th notes. Then just mash keys for
a few seconds and see what pattern you get. My drum machine then lets
you add and subtract different notes from it, so you can actually
build a few patterns and variations with that method.

...and that's just the obvious stuff.

Responding to Rick's concern, I think anything that untrained
musicians can do that gives us a "hey, that sounds good, let's do
that" response probably has a music theory name to it. Us untrained
musicians may spend more time stumbling around in the dark, but many
of us know a good thing when we happen to step in it.

That reminds me - like 10 years ago, someone gave me a program called
"Amen". It was made to randomize percussion wav files for "jungle"
music, but it could be used for any .wav file. Does anyone know
if/where that can still be purchased?

Matt Davignon
www.ribosomemusic.com