===> https://soundcloud.com/mark_hayes/careless-transformations-20 <===

Howdy! I’ve been doing a little experimenting that has turned out more pleasinger than I’d anticipated, so I thought I’d share!

A while ago, I shared a thing I did called “Careless Logic” (https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=663354#Post663354)

This is that song, rendered minimally with recorder and guitar, subjected to a series of basic musical transformations executed using Logic Pro’s “MIDI transform” function.

The first part is the normal song, the second is a transformation with melody and chords inverted, the third is that inversion combined with reversal, the fourth is reversal only, and the fifth is a repeat of the normal song.

A chime tree announces the changes, these are the timings of the variations:

0:00 – prime
0:54 – inversion
1:42 – retrograde inversion
2:30 – retrograde
3:18 – prime

Like I say, I decided to do this just as an experiment, but I find the results really interesting and listenable all the way through. I will definitely be playing with these venerable old compositional techniques more.

Mark

(For the record, the guitar part started life as a BIAB MIDI track, the “notation” part corresponding to a RealTrack. I think it was originally human piano, but at this point there’s not much connection left. I applied rhythmic quantization because the retrograde parts sounded awful without it.)