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From MusicIn2D
Welcome to the mind and music of Clifton Johnston, where computer science, mathematics and music theory conspire together to create innovative art.
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About Me
My name is Clif Johnston. I am an artist, composer, guitarist, poet, web programmer, writer and visionary - which means I am at times multi-faceted, often hyper-focused, and otherwise generally scatter-brained. My passion for music and programming have brought about an obsession with a single project, an evolving algorithmic composition construct known as Geia. Although a couple of years in the making, she is just barely conceived, and still in what I consider to be early stages of development. My goal from the start has been to build a purely web-based algorithmic composer, and so far things are looking promising.
About My Music
At its core, my music is a combination of "aleatoric" or "chance music." and modal fusion. My current focus is on exploring and exposing the unique sonic and emotional qualities of individual modes using a combination of serial and modal concepts. My method borrows a lot of the same ideas and semi-mathematical methodologies as serial composition, while owing more to the jazz of Coltrane than the orchestral works of 20th century composers.
I should mention that 90% of the guitar you will hear in my compositions is through-composed, i.e. improvised in one take. There are a few exceptions (as there always should be) where something came through that begged for repetition or re-ordering via slicing and dicing, but I rarely sit down and map out and rehearse riffs and solos. In that way, my expression on the guitar at the same time contradicts and complements the structural depth of the underlying music... a melding of human transcendence with computerized intelligence, or what I like to call a biomechanical fusion.
Geia
Geia is an algorithmic composition program that I use to create the basis for a new composition. To avoid option anxiety and the often useless results of true randomness, I develop algorithms based on what the late jazz composer William Russo would term resource limitation. For example, my primary interest is in modal exploration, while I have no real interest in 12-tone music, so I limit the melodies that Geia generates to those that fit squarely within a 7 note modal scale. While also randomly generated, tempos are weighted so that the majority fall within a reasonable subset of more common tempos. There are many other variable limitations that come into play.
The Spiral Composition Algorithm
The first algorithm I developed for Geia was based on my own Spiral Composition Method, which expands a musical sequence using rotation, or cyclic permutation. The basis of a composition in this method is an ordered set consisting of 8 notes, one of each of the modal tones of a particular 7-note scale and the octave of the tonic. The set forms the basis of the melody and also directs movement through dimensions. In its earliest form, the algorithm had fixed dimensions, although recent evolution of the method allows for more choice concerning the order, type and number of permutations. ( Read more... )
