I am exited to announce the launch of the Failed Novelists’ Amazing Failed Novel from Failed Publications.  The first edition of the book has already sold out!  Orders for the second edition should be placed with me before Monday of 2nd (4th of May) – please send £3.99 and a posting/pidging address to me at Lincoln College.

Read The Amazing Failed Novel online.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed a chapter to the novel:

• Chapter One – Hubert MacGreevy
• Chapter Two – James Harding
• Chapter Three – Jacques Testard
• Chapter Four – Leonore Lili Schick
• Chapter Five – Selena Wisnom
• Chapter Six – David Durgan
• Chapter Seven – Tom Clucas
• Chapter Eight – Beth Walmswell
• Chapter Nine – Amy Putman
• Chapter Ten – Micah Bluming

Please note that all rights are reserved.

The first public performance of one of my compositions!  As part of the Edinburgh International Festival’s Twittering Machine project celebrating Messiaen’s anniversary, my work, The Byrd Cage, was performed on two dates in the Temperate Palm House of the Royal Botanic Gardens along with pieces by Alasdair Nicholson and other young composers including Gordon Douglas from my jazz trio.

• In The Herald
• On EIF website
• On Festival Insider
• My Mum’s take on the whole thing

To set the record straight, I had actually heard of Messiaen.  Although, to be fair, I still have no idea at all how to pronounce it. (Messy Anne?)

I have been coached by Alasdair before, but never under quite so much pressure: we had just three days to compose, all the while with four professional musicians waiting for us to finish so they could practice or pieces. I’m not looking forward to going back to Sibelius 5 playback after having full time live musicians at my caprice.

Re the Indie lyric meme I completed a while ago, I’ve made my own program to simulate the process.

The Ivory Towers Random Indie Lyric Generator

How does it work?

I split some quotes I found at quotationspage.com into two parts and put them into two arrays. The program randomly chooses one from each and puts them together. To increase the possibilities, I took out all the abstract and common nouns, replacing them a randomly chosen possibility from another set of arrays. So effectively a random sentence structure is filled out with random content. As you can imagine, the lyrics that come out of it don’t make all that much sense, although sometimes it comes out with classics like “the problem with life is cockroaches listening to a barber shop quartet.”

On the one hand it’s great that insightful Indie lyrics are so easy to produce, but it’s also slightly depressing for those of us who spend several hours writing only to be beaten by a stupid javascript app.

I’m going to add more sentence structures and content arrays, so keep checking for updates. Eventually, I hope to make it customisable so users can contribute their own content to it.

A post over on Dial “M” for Musicology really gave me the higgs. One of his postgrad students created a random lyric meme and my result was deeply, deeply profound.

(The Ballad of) William Boddington

The trouble in corporate America is to triumph without glory:
The moment of victory is true, is reasonable.
How to raise your new and better ones?
Without the capacity to more it will contract.

William Boddington (x4)

Reason has always existed where the fruit is:
Unquestioningly, there is progress with all his strength.
Experience is the name – compulsion, not an ambition.
Don’t sacrifice your political convictions at the end of a journey.

William Boddington (x4)

I promise you that’s compleatly random! Although I did cheat on the words per line front to make it all make sense and the punctuation was added with all my usual flair.
If I’m too tired to do real work tomorrow, I will set this to music…

Pi has been kicking about in modern music for a while now, even mainsteam (well, sold in HMV) artists are doing it. To celebrate Pi Day I did a bit of research on this topic. By the end of this post, not only will you have the benifit of all Google’s knowlege on the subject, you will gleam that little bit extra development by yours truly in the form of a fantastic composition of about 10 seconds length.

It all began when mon pére sent me a link to a flash application that uses pi to 10000 decimal places to generate random music. Basically, it assigns each digit 0-9 with a pitch and then runs through pi playing the notes that correspond to each number as it comes up.

The woman in this video has treated pi in the same way, but she has cleverly chosen pitches that make it sound alright, unlike the blues scale, which sounds horrible. I think having a real(ish) performer contributes to its success as well.

This idea can be extended by calculating pi in different counting systems, like binary, hexadecimal and base 12. This means one can genrate pi music for any scale or combanation of notes, rather than just restricting oneself to 10 notes (or having to use notes twice or miss two out of the chromatic scale as in the Pi10k). And yes, the idea has been used visually, assigning a colour to each digit and then using a colour a pixel to fill a pre-defined space.

In theory, as pi is an irrational number and therefore extends forever, any and every melody ever possible is contained somewhere in it. Of cource, you’d have to wait for quite a long time for Ode to Joy to turn up; personally, I think it would be worth it.

So while there is an abundance of pi-generated melody, there seems to be nothing out there that uses pi to generate the harmony or rhythm of a work. Naturally, I had to give it a go. I assigned each chord of the major scale a number, and ran through pi in base seven (3.06636514320361) playing the chords as they came up. I allowed inversions and doubling al la charales, and came up with this:

click to enlarge

More Pi Links

• Rather worryingly, there seems to be a spate of Pi Carols available to be sung on Pi Day (14th March) including my personal favourite Oh Number Pi to the tune of Oh Christmas Tree. After you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all however.

• Now the first thing that came into my head thinking of pi was, of course, Kate Bush’s song Pi from her latest albulm Aerial

• Inevitably, pi generated music is used in hypnotherapy/mediation style musical healing if your interested.