Musical Patterns Two

My Korean composition professor, who is a big fan of Eastern European classical music especially the Polish composer Lutoslavski, told me to write ALL of my rhythms for classical music using the golden mean/fibonacci series in a certain way. Where, for example, 3/4s of the way through there was some variety within two measures. Then again at 3/4s through 4 measures which includes the first two already discussed. And again at 3/4s through 8 measures.

Anyway, if you’re so inclined to search for meaning within mathematical "systems", I came across this page which has about 147 number sequences 1/3rd of the way down the page.

http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/Seis.html

Here is another one with probably thousands:

http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/Sindx_Aa.html

Not all of them seem musically useful to me and I only looked at the one’s with an asterisk which are supposed to be frequently resorted to by mathematicians making them more important in the math world.

How to translate these into musically meaningful ideas will be the topic of the next posts in this thread.

One definition of a pattern is: a succession of local similarities.

Pattern recognition software such as speech recognition, or face recognition use some of the same things we’ll be talking about here. There is also software for identifying patterns within music, which can be difficult because sometimes a repetition of a pattern is so altered that it could just as easily be defined as a new pattern.

They usually say that musical patterns are based on contour, pitches and rhythm. Once a pattern is identified, the third repetition of a pattern can be found merely from it’s contour even if the melodic and rhythmic aspects are significantly distorted.

A note or group of notes make poorly perceptible patterns only when they cannot be related to more salient patterns. Simple suffixes and prefixes of patterns cannot be considered new patterns.

The importance of a pattern within the music is a product of it’s length and the frequency of it’s recurrence. Another musical pattern they talk about is that the degree of slowing reflects the importance of a boundary. So, if either you’re playing a longer note such as a whole note at the end of a tune, that usually signifies it’s the most important boundary in the composition, or if the tune is performing a ritardando after the climax and approaching the final pitch and rhythmic event.

Some of the most basic patterns in music are if a note begins and ends a piece.

If it’s in a metrically important position, is louder than the rest and if it’s accented.

If it has a long duration and if it’s repeated.

If it’s the highest lowers or pivotal within a defining pattern.

Or a member of the harmonic relations, octave, fifth or fourth even if they are only consecutive.

More complex patterns would be motifs, antecedent phrases, consequent phrases, and sections.

Purpose of Music

On the surface it appears that music is for entertainment or as a money-making opportunity for the gifted or the lucky. But if one looks a little deeper it can be seen that music can be used to bring people together to build community in group performances whether that community is in the audience, in the ensemble or both. Music can be used in psychology to help people express their emotions when they find it difficult or impossible to use words. Music therapists use music for healing the sick or the bereaved through its power to stir the emotions. Music can be used to help people unwind after an upsetting day, to enter into meditation, to express the religious sentiment or create drama in the movies. The powers of concentration involved in performing and composing music can give a person a greater chance of success in the world. It can help people see themselves as having an influence on the world and therefore feeling contented if they create something useful and beautiful. A person becomes a co-creator of the universe with the source of all life instead of merely theorizing about life in lofty spheres of abstraction which alone leads to depression and a lack of passion.

Many people are becoming unbalanced as a result of modern life due to its complexity and the difficulty of living sustainable with nature and each other. A call to greater complexity, disharmony and distortion for no other reason than because it is the way we seem to be going is like intentionally stepping on the gas while approaching a fatal fall from a cliff. There must be a balance between randomness and control.

I like aspects of modern education because it is sometimes saying that fields such as music are not separate boxes from other subjects. For example, music composition overlaps music theory, performance and aesthetics. These are obvious. What is not obvious is that music composition overlaps other fields such as religion, philosophy, mythology, architecture, mathematics, sociology and psychology. Music does not have hard boundaries that separate it from everything else and therefore cannot be thought of as a box. The same way that we cannot place ourselves outside nature. We are a part of nature, the trees are our external! lungs and there is no escaping the fact without them we would all die.