Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Temporary Notes (4)

From a lunchtime chat with young composers. (Click to enlarge image). It's astonishing how many subtle variations arise from taking a simple sequence of events -- in this case, a measure with three equal pulses -- and deforming the sequence through a global operation, one applied to the measure as a whole. In this talk I suggested the metaphor of a magnet, with its attraction varying among the individual notes by position & distance, but there are a number of other useful metaphors and methods of formalizing similar effects.

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