Tempered Chance

Aleatoric music may be described as being based on composition that leaves some elements to chance. In this work an aleatoric note sequence generator was created in software, and then realized again as a physical piece of hardware that was connected to a modular synthesizer system. The hardware version of the sequencer allows the composer/player to set a number of rules ahead of time, and then facilitates the manual adjustment of related rule parameters during performance.

The first piece below was generated with the aleatoric sequencer playing (more or less) in a minor pentatonic scale, with the modular synthesizer, at 480 beats per minute. The second piece was generated by the same system, but in a major pentatonic scale, at 4 bpm. In the third piece, brief patterns are generated, then repeated, and then changed, in a sort of rhythmic improvisational style, with rather severe additional changes between scales and note ranges, all at 540 bpm. The last piece is perhaps the most challenging to listen to casually, as it is an exploration of sundry unusual capabilities of the sequence generator, all based on a major scale (not that the scale really matters here).

The following videos each consist of the same series of pictures, taken at one minute intervals from dawn to dusk, during a day in May. The first video is accompanied by the first piece above, playing at 480 beats per minute. The second video uses the second piece from above, which is played at 4 bpm.