josh kopeček

You can now access and download my music easily via music.joshkopecek.co.uk

There will be scores and other media available there soon.

Two articles have come to my attention:

The first from the Economist on the necessity of doctorates. Being a doctoral student myself, many of the points of the article ring true. Read it here.

The second is a speech by Tom Service (of the Guardian) at the Sound festival, regarding the necessity of ‘contemporary classical music’. Being uncomfortably wedged into a spot that one might (with some clenching of teeth) call ‘contemporary classical’, this also rang particularly true for me. Read it here, plus a quick quote below:

“The problem I’m dealing with is that there are still some composers, institutions, and ideologies out there who are labouring under the misapprehension that what they’re doing is the single true path, the way of the future, the sole route to enlightenment, and the real reflection of our times – and I think that those ways of thinking can perniciously permeate contemporary classical musical culture.”

Comments on how the two articles may give a clue to the future of extended research into ‘new music’ are welcome.

The title of this recalls Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture. I have been working on this for quite some time.

A writeup of methods for calculating dissonance.

I wrote, as part of my Masters, an extended essay on the subject of dissonance. The proposal was that dissonance could be objectified, and subsequently used as a musical parameter. At the time I did not have at my disposal the means to be able to investigate this further, and as a result the findings were more theoretical in nature.

Rationale

I have always felt that dissonance was as strong a musical parameter as timbre, register or even harmony. However, it has always been approached from a traditional point of view, that is to say, subjectively: with precedence given to the ear (hegemony of the ear). “The introduction of polyphony was regarded as dissonant a millennium ago”, clearly suggesting that the boundaries for what is considered dissonant have moved considerably in the intervening years. Dissonance, from composition to the appraisal of music, has been subjectively assessed; other areas of music have been heavily academicised, harmony being the obvious example, and subjected to heavy scrutiny and intellectual rigor from the outset of musical notation. So why not dissonance?

Read more »

Finally I got around to changing The Monk’s Lesson recording to the version recorded with Christine Clancy at EMS earlier this year. You can listen to the stereo mix here (the original is quadrophonic). I strongly recommend you listen on headphones or with decent monitoring. I recorded all the samples for the electronics (and the recorded flute part) in 192khz at 24bit and did all my processing at full resolution. The result was a clarity and precision which I hadn’t achieved with previous works.

The Monk’s Lesson by joshkopecek

I’m currently working on a new large scale piece, hence the silence.

There will be, at some point, a post on the method used to generate some of the pitches for this piece. For this I used an (shock, horror) algorithm.

The instrumentation is:
string quartet
brass quintet
piano, laptop, soprano, electric guitar, and drum kit

I’m off to Stockholm, to the EMS studios.

I am kindly supported by The Bliss Trust/PRS Award for my travel and the EMS studios for my accommodation

Whilst there I’ll be working on a new piece for Psappha, and completing my string quartet that the Danels will perform. My original reason for going was to work on my piece The Monk’s Lesson, written for Christine Clancy and performed at the Royal Northern College of Music during the New Music North West festival last year. However, since the performance of that piece has passed and I hadn’t succeeded in finding accommodation in Stockholm, I decided to postpone the residency and bided my time until now. I was lucky enough to receive kind support from EMS for my accommodation during the residency, in addition to the Bliss/PRSF Award.

Recently I made a discovery. For a while I’ve been working on new ways of looking at harmony, especially with respect to analysing one’s own harmonic usage. Obviously listening is usually the first step, but I was dissatisfied with the way that we can describe different levels of dissonance or consonance in harmony. For me dissonance is a sliding colour scale, currently purely subjective and unquantifiable. Since this is subjective and can never be anything more than that, developing an objective method for defining dissonance could only ever be useful on a personal scale. Current descriptions of dissonance range from ‘dissonant’ or ‘consonant’ to specific author’s styles ‘Messiaenic harmony’ (although this could mean many things) and to the many adjectives normally associated with lay-appraisal of atonal or serial music (‘brash’ etc., usually pejorative).

I think it is necessary to look beyond this, and to think about intervals, major and minor harmony, scales, dodecaphonicism, in a new light. One where the relationships remain constant for harmony across all styles. It’s useless to describe Boulez’ music in terms of major and minor, as with Ockeghem but for completely different reasons.

So, he comes to the harmonic series. This is the one constant in music, present in all pitched instruments (in fact the basis of how we recognise pitch), and very possibly the key to how our ear is able to distinguish two separate pitches in a chord, even when they are almost in unison. For my Masters I did some research into dissonance, and made some inroads into how pitches interact, and for example why an octave is considered consonant by most people and why a minor second is dissonant. Basically, although inconclusive, octaves share most harmonics with each other, apart from one per octave. Minor seconds, on the other hand, share very few, at least until many octaves higher in the harmonic series, when the harmonics become less than a semitone. I set about the work of providing a theory of this, which is still in progress.

More recently I came across (whilst reading Michel Chion’s translation/transmogrification of Schaeffer’s Traité) Edmond Costère’s Lois et Styles des Harmonies Musicales. Costère’s book describes his reexamination of harmony from the perspective of basic rules of acoustics, primarily the harmonic series, and provides charts of analysis of scales from this perspective, an analysis of major harmony, it is disarmingly simple, and was just as easily dismissed at the time of publication. But it is quite obviously before its time, before Spectralism appeared and when people were still grappling with the Highest Art preoccupations of whether harmony needed reinventing or not. Costère is not suggesting we restyle everything, but in fact to reexamine the way we look at harmony, that there is a bigger picture and a simpler but more comprehensive method of analysis of functional and non-functional harmony, that spans the gaping abyss between tonal harmony and serial music, between spectralism and new complexity.

What is less convincing for me is his explanation of the roots of diatonic minor harmony, which consists in inverting the harmonic series in order to find the minor third. Instead for me at this early stage I see minor harmony as a séquelle from the modes; diatonic minor is quite easily accounted for as the aeolian or dorian medieval modes, shoehorned into functional harmony (sharpening of the 6th/7th degrees). Although, this doesn’t fit it in quite so neatly into Costère’s hypotheses.

Currently, this is an unfinished story. I have not finished Costère’s tome, nor the other equally outrageously titled Mort ou Transfigurations de l’Harmonie, which I have on loan from the British Library. I intend to assimilate, modify and bring his methodologies for analysis and appraisal of harmony into the 21st Century. It will become a tool for analysis applicable to most systems of harmony (diatonic, dodecaphonic, quarter-tone), and possibly may influence the way I compose, harmonically speaking. This has, of course, nothing to do with rhythm, timbre, structure or form, thus leaving one free to compose the same music but aware of another perspective on the harmony that they are using. Suffice to say that for me this is a breakthrough, rather late in the day, but it has answered some questions that I have long posed (those of a quantitative scale of dissonance and alternative hierarchy of tones) and equally triggered others (was Costère just a blithering fool with a prejudice against established rules of harmony?).

This site has just had a major overhaul, and been upgraded to work completely on WordPress.

There are new pages for my catologue of works – Music; Ninnananna – with pictures from performances and information; an About page with my contact details; this blog with updates on my research; and the Events page upcoming performances.

Since it’s really been a while since I posted here, I’m going to publish my research on getting an Arduino based interface to talk directly to something else via MIDI. This project could easily be expanded to more complex solutions (i.e. not just two momentary switches), could easily use OSC, channel MIDI data across a network, have a more complex user interface. The point with this stage in the project was to get a framework to build new projects from.

When I first started working with Ruby and Cocoa, the RubyCocoa project was pretty elementary, but many leaps and bounds have been made. Thanks go out to bleything and and the RubyCocoa team without whose wonderful work this would not be possible.

Making an interface from scratch with the Arduino at its core

Equipment needed:

• arduino (diecimila or equivalent)
• wire + wire cutters
• breadboard
• selection of resistors (10k preferable)
• switches (any sort, I used momentary)
• computer – mac, linux or pc (mac preferable)
• box of some sort – optional
• soldering iron – only necessary for finishing the project

# Wire a switch – one side to ground and the other to digital input 6. Use the breadboard.
# Put a resistor between the side of the switch connected to ground and +5v.
This is called a pullup resistor and makes the current default to ‘on’ or +5v when the switch is closed. When the switch is open, the voltage remains at 0v.

If you want additional switches, follow the two steps above making sure you use a new resistor each time.

Difficult bit: find a nice box and glue the whole lot into it and plug in a usb cable.

Getting your computer prepared to talk to the Arduino

If you are comfortable with using the terminal, and want a one-step install for the various packages required for this tutorial, try:

MacPorts

To install: go to the MacPorts website and install using the installer there.
Check everything is working by firing up a terminal and typing

port version

which should return

Version: 1.710

Preparing Ruby

All the below are necessary before continuing

Installing (upgrading) Ruby
Ruby is already included in MacOSX, but for compatibility reasons, it’s best to upgrade. If you’re happy with your installation, just continue as is until you come up against any errors. Please note the Ruby included with 10.4 is very old, and possibly broken.
Fire up a terminal (if it isn’t already open from above) and type

sudo port upgrade ruby

Rubygems — required to use the below libraries
Fire up a terminal (if it isn’t already open from above) and type

sudo port install rb-rubygems

MIDIator — Ruby MIDI library
MIDIator allows us to use Ruby to easily create MIDI messages in a simple and comprehensible fashion
Fire up a terminal (if it isn’t already open from above) and type

sudo gem install midiator

Serialport — Ruby Serial Port library
This is installed by default as part of Ruby, but best to upgrade:

sudo gem upgrade ruby-serialport

Easy! Just sit back and watch incomprehensible lines of text scroll by.

Arduino code

The Arduino itself requires code to run. This tells the Arduino what to do with incoming and outgoing data. The language is called Wiring.

Make sure you have the Arduino programming environment installed (from http://arduino.cc)

Use the following code:
To explain, the first block initialises the pins we will use.
The setup() method initialises the pins and serial connection and tells us that they are sending data in to the Arduino.

The loop() method reads the pins every cycle, stores the data in variables and decides what to do with it. In this case, it sends a different value to the computer if the pin is up or down. The swi variable checks if it’s already been sent, and prevents doubling the ‘note on’ value. i.e. it can’t send a note off before it’s sent a note on and vice versa.

 /*

 sends serial data over usb to be converted by ruby to MIDI..

 */

int inPin1 = 6;   // choose the input pin (for a pushbutton)
 int inPin2 = 7;
 int val1 = 0;     // variable for reading the pin status
 int val2 = 0;
 boolean swi1 = false;
 boolean swi2 = false;

void setup() {
 Serial.begin(9600);
 pinMode(inPin1, INPUT);    // declare pushbutton as input
 }

void loop(){
 val1 = digitalRead(inPin1);  // read input val1ue
 val2 = digitalRead(inPin2);

if (val1 == HIGH && swi1 == false) {         // check if the input is HIGH (button released)
 swi1 = true;
 Serial.println(89, DEC);
 delay(100);
 }

if (val1 == LOW && swi1 == true){            // check if the input is low and it's just been high
 swi1 = false;
 Serial.println(90, DEC);
 delay(100);
 }

if (val2 == HIGH && swi2 == false) {         // check if the input is HIGH (button released)
 swi2 = true;
 Serial.println(91, DEC);
 delay(100);
 }

if (val2 == LOW && swi2 == true){            // check if the input is low and it's just been high
 swi2 = false;
 Serial.println(92, DEC);
 delay(100);
 }

}

Building a simple communication script in Ruby

Download the RubyMIDI.zip file and look in the lib folder at usbchecker.rb. This checks to see if the Arduino is present. In short, OSX creates a list of all the USB devices on your computer at /dev/. This script checks for one in the correct syntax for an Arduino, and passes it back to our main program.

Look in the main folder at BasicMIDI.rb. This contains all the information to communicate with the Arduino and change it to MIDI data.  The require functions at the top load in the libraries we installed earlier – rubygems, midiator, serialport and the file we’ve just looked at, usbchecker.rb. The first paragraph runs the usbchecker.rb and passes the identity of the Arduino back and initialises it (turns it on and starts communicating with it).

The next paragraph creates a MIDI device with Midiator and tells it to send all MIDI data to CoreMIDI on OSX, also known as the IAC Driver (Load up Audio MIDI setup and have a look).

The whole of the next section is a bit boring, and merely consists in grabbing data from the serial port and converting it into a meaningful format rather than the incomprehensible rubbish that comes across normally. sp.getc.chr grabs a character (getc) from the serial port (sp), and converts it into a real character (chr). The next loop puts it into a string.

Then, if it has something, it decides which one it’s received from the Arduino (see above that we’re sending different numbers according to what’s happening) and sends either a midi note on (midi.note_on(89, 1, 100)) or note off (midi.note_off(89, 1, 0)).

The other parts are failsafes for if it receives a line-end or newline character – the Arduino sends these after each transmission as part of the Serial.println() method.

Magic, that’s all the code explained

We can run this script by opening a terminal, typing ruby and dragging and dropping the BasicMIDI.rb file into the window, then hitting return. It will fail if there isn’t an Arduino present.

Integrating your Ruby script into a fully fledged native MacOSX application

First, go and download Xcode from http://developer.apple.com and install it. This will take a while.

You’ll notice there’s another folder called RubyCocoaUSBApp which contains lots of files and folders and a file ending .xcodeproj which has our Xcode project in it. Open this, and Xcode will open the project. You’ll notice the lib folder is still there, and that AppController.rb has the same code as BasicMIDI.rb above. It’s not necessary to know the structure of the rest of the folders, just that there’s lots of necessary stuff in there that it’s unwise to touch. Just modify the AppController.rb with your code and link it into the MainMenu.nib using Interface Builder – I won’t explain here because it’ll take ages, unless people need me to? Easy peasy.

Next step: Build and Run (Command-R).
This should launch our fully fledged application, which runs when we click on the button. It will display ‘Ready’ when connected and sending MIDI.

Simply connect any MIDI client to the built-in IAC Driver on OSX and away we go.

Oh, and before I forget, here’s the fully fledged application in case you’re having problems compiling using Xcode.

Probably I should introduce this paper, because it will be familiar only to the most hardened contemporary music researcher, at least in the English speaking world. It is Gérard Grisey’s Tempus ex Machine: A composer’s reflections on musical time, from Contemporary Music Review, 2:1, pp.239–275.

Firstly I think it would be a mistake to think that this paper is about time in music. The word time, when brought up in relation to music practice, usually recalls such words as ‘tempo’, ‘rhythm’, maybe even ‘groove’. However, although Grisey starts by talking about rhythm, he’s referring to the experience of music. Jonathan D. Kramer also talks about the same thing in more detail in his book The Time of Music: new meanings, new temporalities, new listening strategies (1988). Both of these are an attempt to justify or somehow examine the difference between time as experienced in normal life (clock time) and time as experienced in music (musical time). I must say I’m not a fan of his confusing categorisation of the different types of time (the skeleton of time, the flesh of time, and the skin of time), as they are hardly as elucidating as the rest of the text.

To delve straight into the text, I’d like to reinforce an element in my thinking that Grisey raises, which I call repetition, and he calls periodicity. We are examining the same concept from different angles, mine from the ‘material’ point of view and he from the ‘rhythm’ point of view, although with a certain leap of faith we could regard them as interchangeable (rhythm being the repetition of material). I quote Grisey quoting Abraham Moles “the notion of rhythm is linked to that of expectation”, and this in turn leads us to realise that a framework has to be established in order to perceive rhythm. Repetition is that framework – if we repeat a bar twice, we expect it a third time. If we have three bars of material and we repeat the first two, we will expect the third. If we play quavers in 4/4 for 10 bars and switch to crotchets, we gain the listener’s attention when we change. Grisey returns to the concept of periodicity at the end of the paper:

How many times have we sat through a piece that had beautiful material in, but an hour after the concert was completely lost from memory? Sometimes, as a composer, it is forgotten that the listener may only hear the piece once. We’d be very lucky if they sought out a recording of the piece (if one was even available), and even then there is a limited amount of listens a particular person is going to dedicate to it. What I am getting at is that there is a limited (set) amount of time available to develop and demonstrate your material. We are also assuming that our dutiful listener is even paying attention the whole time through the performance, that it’s not boring them or that they’ve even had to sit through five other difficult, new contemporary music pieces.

Coming back to periodicity, Grisey outlines his composition Périodes, in which he examines fuzzy periodicity. This is the idea of a constantly fluctuating pulse, determined by (statistically-speaking) a sort of normal distribution around a fixed pulse. I challenge this notion as a compositional parameter. A performer can never absolutely determine the time between actions, only estimate. So even the strictest tempo from a performer constantly fluctuates around an ideal tempo. So what Grisey is suggesting is already part of performance. True, what he is really saying is that he wishes to investigate this phenomenom, but the truth is that the contrast between the intentional fuzzy periodicity and real performer leeway is much more subtle than he imagines.

In the acoustic world nothing is exact. Everything is an approximation—even frequencies, partials, rhythms, tunings, scales etc. In the electronic world, introducing this human element—the almost random/approximate/fuzzy—becomes a lot of hard work and is not intuitive. Often we have to try to approximate live performance by reproducing certain elements of approximate rhythm, timbre etc., and even more frequently is this element completely ignored. The perfection of electronic sound is immediately identifiable if not directly describable. We can listen to a piece of music and identify the parts that have been sequenced (read: never been near an instrument) and those which are recorded from real life. Likewise the ear will immediately notice an exact loop and be less fatigued by an indirect repetition. That means more mileage out of the same material: not boredom but a chance to convey our point more clearly.

To recapitulate or not to recapitulate. Recapitulation has been a mainstay of composition for centuries, for the reason that the listener immediately identifies with and gets a (small) sense of achievement from having identified material that was presented earlier. This immediately links the composer, performer and listener in a chain of understanding, and probably more importantly, communication—even on the most basic level. For me it seems that without this basic premise the music has to be stylistically immediately identifiable. That is, the audience is going to the performance knowing the way in which you work and the boundaries of your compositional language (your ‘sound’). They are prepared to be surprised, but they have a grounding upon which to base aural judgements.