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).

Algorithmic Composition | OpenMusic Rhythm Trees Tutorial Part 2

In our last algorithmic composition tutorial we introduced using Rhythm Trees in OpenMusic. Rhythm trees are powerful ways of representing complex musical rhythms, the downside is that they can be a little cumbersome to enter by hand.

Fortunately we can use some of the built in objects in OpenMusic and simple algorithmic composition techniques to generate rhythm trees and musically interesting rhythms for us.

Algorithmic Composition | OpenMusic Rhythm Trees Tutorial Part 1

In previous algorithmic composition tutorials we've looked at using OpenMusic for algorithmic composition, today's algorithmic composition tutorial introduces Rhythm Trees.

Rhythm trees are a way of representing rhythm with nested lists. The notation can get quite unwieldy and a little complicated, however these disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages. using rhythm trees it's possible to represent very complex rhythms with relatively simple notation, it's also possible to create simple and complex rhythms using algorithmic composition techniques.

The simplest way to work with rhythm trees is to enter a list of rhythms and connect this to the tree input of a voice object.