Tone Rows - PureData and Max

Today's algorithmic composition tutorial looks at manipulating a tone row in Max and PureData to generate musical material. We'll also have a look at one technique that's useful in generating more fully formed compositions in Pd and Max than some of the musical sketches we've generated so far.

Jump to the end of the post to hear some sample algorithmic music output from this patch.

As with yesterday's OpenMusic tutorial we're using the tone row from Berg's Violin Concerto:

  G, Bb, D, F#, A, C, E, G#, B, C#, Eb, F

You can use any tone row of your choosing. To start with we'll define our tone row in a table in PureData

and in Max

We'll start simply by playing through the tone row. As Max and PureData read and write to tables in slightly different ways the patches are setup a little differently in each. In Max the table object is used to read the table data:

Open Music - Tone Rows and the Maquette

Today's algorithmic composition tutorial looks at using OpenMusic to manipulate and generate musical material from tone rows.

If you haven't already got OpenMusic 6.5 installed you can download OpenMusic free for Mac and PC here. IRCAM supply a number of tutorials but you can also look through the OpenMusic tutorials available here.

Jump to the end of the post to hear some sample algorithmic music output from this patch.

Serialism developed as a framework for composing and organising atonally and moves away from the sense of a key by giving each pitch equal worth. This patch starts with a tone row from the Berg Violin Concerto:

   G, Bb, D, F#, A, C, E, G#, B, C#, Eb, F

All pitches must be played through in order, in order to provide more melodic material the tone row can be transposed to any pitch, inverted and played backwards.

First we'll create our tone row (to create a new object CMD click and type in to the box created).