Fugue and looping

[Tobias Sjögren <sjogren@swipnet.se>]

One of my interests for the past 2 years has been fugues, and J. S. Bach's ones in particular, playing them on my guitar.

And since a few weeks I've been doing some experimentation with looping.

Now, I believe there could be an interesting connection between Fugues and looping.

One of the basic principle of the fugue is repetition (or better: imitation), not an exact imitation but a transformed one.

To begin with, you transpose the repetition up a fifth up, or a forth down. But not all the notes are transposed at the same interval - there usually is one or more notes that are transposed.

There are some basic principles about fugues and how the further transformation of the repetition is done:

Retrograde (the melody is played in Reverse/Backwards)

Inverse (the melody is turned upside-down)

Augmentation (usually, the melody is played at 2x speed)

Diminuation (usually, the melody is played at 0.5x speed)

+ any combinations of the above.

My idea is that maybe there could be a way to combine the Fugue repetition principles and looping.

Not exactly an easy task, but maybe it could be done...

You would need an algorithm that would be able to this:

• transpose notes at different intervals.

• invert intervals.

Anyone?

...Tobias