Series: Robot Music I, Robot Music II: Modes, Robot Music III: The Circle of Fifths, Robot Music IV: Scales of the World

So far everything has been derived from the Major Scale, but now I have some new scales to introduce. These are foreign and exotic scales with fascinating new sounds!

After RM1 as a proof of concept, RM2 introduced the Major modes and RM3 explained how they work. Now RM4 will introduce new scales and–guess what?–RM5 will explain how they work. This episode also includes a bit more information on chords.

TO THE SCALES!

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Series: Robot Music I, Robot Music II: Modes, Robot Music III: The Circle of Fifths, Robot Music IV: Scales of the World

New logo baby.

Robot Music I proved that a pleasing song can be randomly generated under the right guidelines. Those guidelines stuck to a 4/4 rhythm and the C Major Pentatonic Scale.

Robot Music II proved that the C key could be replaced with any other (changing the root). It also showed that the Major Pentatonic Scale (5 notes) could be expanded to the Major Scale (7 notes) without harming our method. And most importantly, this section covered modes and demonstrated that shifting a song’s mode can significantly change its tone. Knowing that the tone can be changed, how can we control it?

Robot Music III introduces the Circle of Fifths. It is a basic musical tool that will help us predict the impact of a mode of the Major Scale. With it, our Robot can place notes along 2 dimensions (Consonance vs. Dissonance, Dominance vs. Sub-Dominance) and estimate the emotional impact of a note according to an arbitrary algorithm based on personal tastes.

This installment is the first to go into the perception of music. To begin, we must discuss aural perception and some musical fundamentals. That technical information will be related to our previous musical concepts by the use of the Circle of Fifths. And finally, a demonstration of mode relationships and some discussion of their popular uses.

You probably already know some of this, so I’ll try to move fast.

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Series: Robot Music I, Robot Music II: Modes, Robot Music III: The Circle of Fifths, Robot Music IV: Scales of the World

It’s been a long while, but response to the last music post was enough to get me revved up again. Now it’s time to continue with the Robot Music series on procedurally written music.

I wanted this tutorial to be simple, but educational enough that if you wanted to study more, you would know where to look. For that reason, there is a lot of music vocabulary in here. I’ve done my best to explain each term as it comes up, but if any remain confusing, don’t hesitate to look them up elsewhere or even skip them. You can probably forget all of the fancy words and still understand the important concepts being discussed.

In the last session we rolled a die to generate riffs in a Major Pentatonic Scale. Sticking to that one scale limits the sound of your music a lot, so now we’ll mix up our technique by exploring modes. We’ll be replacing the Major Pentatonic Scale with the full Major Scale. The pentatonic only has 5 notes, while the entire Major Scale has 7. Those last two notes can be seen as bothersome* which is why they were left out last time.

Most people’s first musical revelation is the amazing power of switching between a Major scale and a Minor scale. It’s often generalized that when a song is in the Major scale it sounds happy and when it’s in a Minor scale it sounds sad. That is the effect we will be looking into to change the emotional impact of robot songs.

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Series: Robot Music I, Robot Music II: Modes, Robot Music III: The Circle of Fifths, Robot Music IV: Scales of the World

(This post features the hip guitar stylings of none other than ME! I’ll play some real life, randomly generated, Robot Music! The link is at the end.)

I’ve wanted to see more procedural music in games for a long time, but the most we see are pretty sorry attempts. I’m not just talking about “shifting volume on pre-recorded riffs” procedural, I mean “the game is writing its own live soundtrack” procedural.

“But Chris, that doesn’t even happen on consoles! We can’t do it in flash, no way!” Sounds difficult or even impossible, but it isn’t. The only problem is it takes an understanding of tricky programming concepts and tricky musical concepts. Without programmers that also study music theory, we just don’t see procedurally written music.

Well, I’d like to help change that. I know a thing or two about music and a thing or two about programming so in this article I’m going to do my best to tip off any programmers interested in putting together a simple music generator. Today’s generator won’t be truly procedural, but it’ll start things off in that direction.

And if you play a little music, but don’t know how to write a song, maybe this article can help you out too.

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