 Okay, I can go. Yes. Hello and hello again to some of you Because as this part of the slide says my name is Steve and as that part of the slide says I'm a bit of a geek if we've all turned up to the right room I'm gonna be talking about how I compose the symphony with JavaScript now It's not the react talk if you were wondering My react talk would basically be it sucks, but you get a job and this How many of them did I divide with that comment? I'm only a couple not so bad. Okay, so Symphony number one because I've only written one And I kind of like the old traditional way of doing things. So over the course of the next 20 25 minutes I'm gonna be talking about that symphony the origins of it its creation process and the other stuff that sort of went along with it it's Quite old I started this way back in the 90s There were probably some of you that weren't even born in the 90s. It's that long ago So in 1996 and I had to look this up for my own records. I was reading a book those are the paper things by the way and there was this comment in there about a composer called George Leggetti and There was a thing that he'd written which was fairly modern and it was a hundred Metronomes all ticking at a slightly different tempo and I thought That's quite interesting Not because musically it might be interesting But the idea that you would just have Seemingly random events coming from metronomes of them going into sequence and coming out again I thought I wonder what that sounds like. That must be quite interesting now to also give some context of 1996 Amazon wasn't there. It was one year old and only sold books So not going to be able to get this recording of George Leggetti that way eBay was a year old Google was nowhere near and YouTube still nine years away now if you want to get some music you just go to YouTube. It's pretty much all there But this poem symphonique was not there. It was also not in my local library. I Grew up in a place in the middle of nowhere where the local library had cassette tapes and not much else and certainly would not have George Leggetti So I had no choice I'd have to play it myself But I'm not in the general idea of I will just go to the music shop and buy 100 metronomes that was a bit too much but I Had an idea I just code it myself Which I did I wrote a MIDI library the first one was in C the later one is in JavaScript And I just went away line by line by line and wrote it Sounded awful Complete another waste of time but It did give me an idea This is what he came up with in the 60s. It's the 60s modernist composition He's he had metronomes he could do that But I thought I have a computer I'm not limited to whatever a little box of wood will tick I Can generate notes. I can change these notes. I can do anything I want so the first idea I had was not very original to be honest And it was this I Started off. I had one note in a bar. I Then put two notes in a bar. I then put you can see where this is going, right? Um Does anyone want to guess on how far I pushed this joke up to 32 beats in a bar and I thought okay This will be one note. This will be another note. Maybe a third or a fifth higher This will be the note maybe a seventh up and an octave up and so forth I'll use a piano because that's a nice simple instrument It's got the range whereas a lot of other instruments in the orchestra. I've got this only sort of two octave range I wanted a big range because I wanted 32 notes playing simultaneously and It wrote the code I put this in and It didn't sound awful. I'll show I'll play you an excerpt If I can remember what I called it That one I think Yes, I don't think Britney's got anything to worry about but for me it was like This would not have been possible Back in the day It's only possible because the machine is precise enough to be able to play 31 notes in a bar and get every single one of them correct As a musician you can generally play 32 because you're used to that you used to playing twos threes fours sometimes fives But 31 for a human is almost impossible So the machine was the only way to do it But it's as you can hear it's quite funky. It's not very interesting So I added two bits to this. I slowed it down. So over time it gets slower and slower and I created a morph So it starts off as a piano and it ends as a harp. So if I fast-forward It's a quite sort of dreamy or sense and kind of a sound But because it changes gradually over time you don't obviously notice something's happening And again, this is something I was only able to do with the machine by making very slight adjustments to the sound every Time programmatically If you want to see some code, I might even have some not yet. I've got some code later So that was the first idea I did a few tweaks to it and it's the whole rule. I'm sure most of you have heard the rule that most of work especially creative work is 90% inspiration and 10% perspiration and that's exactly the way it should be right when Unfortunately, you spend all your time just faffing around trying to get things right Not that original 10% of inspiration. So we listen to it. So I I wrote it. I Came out my midi and I thought right That's okay Not gonna break any world records, but it's okay Then I thought well, what else can I do? Essentially, all I'm doing is creating asynchronous rhythms What else can I do that's asynchronous? If you want the code, that's that's the code So I started thinking of other things and coming up with other ideas because I've got the code now I've written this library. I might as well use it and I'd always had a fascination with fractals self-similar images usually Which at one level look the same and at a slightly deeper level also look the same So I thought is this possible with a composition Can I have a melody line that goes from here to here? But if you take every other note, it plays the same melody line and Then you take every other note from that and it produces another melody Which is the same as the original just half as long and the answer is yes, you can and If you do that you do it programmatically and then you double the length of each note I wrote this and it lasted a minute and I thought it's never gonna get into the pop charts unless it's four minutes So I repeated it four times Steve Reich has taught me well as I've Philip glass So I told you there'd be music jokes. I just didn't tell you there would be funny music jokes So I repeated it four times. I offset the starting note by a semi-craver every time so that the notes would fall into Very slightly different places Regenerated it and it sounds something like this And the symbol is there to sort of just remind me when one bit stops and the next bit starts up It was not artistic But of course when you start getting these ideas and you've got that technology at hand every single problem says, okay I'm gonna solve it with this tool So I started doing more things on on the idea of asynchronous rhythms. Okay, I'll show you some code Well, I do that. So there's some code. I did change it slightly from the original. It really was vase I've changed it to let's because that's more common that my Yeah, open office just puts capitals in there instead nowadays, but it's okay. You see it is really simple You can create files with the library You sync up the tracks because you're using time as I was talking about in the media web media talk early on Media itself doesn't really have the concept of time. The time it has is real-world time You send a note message you wait the right amount of real-world time and then send the note off message in a file You have to store that as a difference in time. However, many pulses per quarter note and that number will vary on each track So you have to then re-sync them up so everything's level But otherwise it's just a case of adding notes adding notes and adding notes That's what one of the things looks like. It's not very interesting. I'm afraid but it's music. It's meant to be listened to apparently so Made midi and web media especially does not have sound Might seem weird for a sound library to have but midi doesn't have sound It just has the indication that there should be a sound the midi fire will say I want a piano here I want a violin there doesn't tell them how the piano should sound Doesn't say how the violin should sound or what type of violin or even if it's being plucked or bowed just we want to violin So all of this has to be realized And for that you need synthesizers Which I didn't bring so I just bought this as an example that I can play a little bit So the process is actually quite simple, and it's what you probably expect You get the Java script to create the midi file You listen to it in my case. I used cake walk which is now defunct You listen through it. You think I don't like the notes or there are too many notes clustering up here I'll put this an octave above. I Don't like the speed. I'll slow it down speed it up Because all of the time every single one of these is an experiment There was no way of being able to predict ahead of time what it's gonna sound like and if it's even gonna sound any good So load it up listen to it, and then this is where the human part comes in Do I like it? Do I see something in there and a number of the times? I didn't I listened back, and I thought I've just wasted my evening There's nothing in there, but every now and again something will come up It's like I didn't expect that let me explore that a bit further There's always tricks and it does feel sometimes that it is a little bit of a trickster thing composing like this As it probably would if you were doing it with AI is that if you don't like that thing You just keep changing the parameters until it does sound good There is no real way of with algorithmic music that I found yet that you can just say I know this will be good if I just do that It's always the case of just twiddling everything you can until either you get fed up and you're convinced there's nothing there Or it sounds reasonably good Once you've done that you decide what sounds you're going to have on it Is it going to be the piano to harp thing? Is there going to be a lot of uh orchestral stuff? I did do a bit with a choir in it, and then you record it And that's it. That's pretty much it done. I had some other ideas. I created the factor one as I mentioned earlier I also tried a thing with volume Because you're able to change all these parameters You can just play one chord for the entire piece and change the volume of those individual notes I got the idea from Jean-Michel Jarre's waiting for Cousteau Which was basically a 45 minute piece with two sounds in it I thought if he can get away with it And I think it's that one Those extra random. I think it's a sitar not sitar a guitar playing over the top They're just random bits I put in there, but they're only random If you have no idea who I am If you know who I am Then you'll know every important event in my life, and you'll know that I've transcribed my bio rhythms Which are apparently true science Of my emotional states my physical and my is it mental? Bio rhythms which cadence in 28 day 31 day 25 day cycles So whenever those things coincide and things happen in my life I made a note of them and those notes are triggered at that part of the song But all intents and purposes. It's sort of ambient mood music And I also did do an hour long version of that one as well I also introduced it with this as well because I thought it'd be quite fun Well, let's go Again, this section is all just one chord which is C sharp minor And the volume of each note in that chord is going up and down gradually in and out of phase And that's the tinkle effect that says that was probably my birthday Is bio rhythms still a thing do people still do bio rhythms? When I was younger and learning to code every programming book I ever got seemed to have an example on how to draw bio rhythms Because they're very simple to render. It's just a couple of sine waves So my general thing has been to start simple and then get esoteric You'll see some extra ideas. You'll hear something go. I'm going to try that It's all emergent. You never know what's coming out the end So all you need to do is add a nice introduction to something and then add a nice ending That's another one of those examples, which is badly formatted so I won't linger Yeah, I tried doing a scale so just one normal scale from C to C and repeat it very quickly Broken melodies where I start all the notes at the same time and then gradually I move them off of that time Which is another thing which is very difficult for humans to play You naturally will not follow in with the same beat that everyone else is going So when you have to play it just a fraction of a second later or a fraction a second before It's very difficult to do it. So it's another one of these things where the machine is pretty much the only machine The only way of performing these pieces So I'd written it I'd recorded the demo at home But I didn't have very nice synthesizers So I found a recording studio in north london where I used to live and got it recorded properly Also had to get it mastered Now recording things in a studio is easy. That's fine. You just pay the money and the engineers tweak all the knobs to make sure it works Well, mastering is another thing where you just have to give them money But this thing that sounds good on your headphones will sound different on my headphones to sound different coming out the speakers at home To the recording studio speakers and to your machine So there's a process called mastering which all professional recordings go through so it sounds good in any format And that's just another expense. Basically people sit there with computers and twiddle dials And I have no idea why it's doing all that and I And I and you get make sure you get the lossless versions of everything because mp3 is awful And we're finished almost I still after doing all this I still had to come up with a color cover for the The album and this is what I came up with simple enough Steve my stage name for music Symphony number one and a load of computer screens which are The the full color pattern is in octal Anyone here counting octal? You will now The least significant bit on that side most significant there goes from gray to white to yellow to black or dark and then again all the way through This was also generated in java script I found an image which was a little piece of clip art like that and I rendered the whole thing out and I think it's about 2000 by 2000 png I have no idea where the source to that bit is however I then had to create a biography myself. I've never had to do that as a musician before So you have to go through and you've got to write nice little snappy things about Why that you are very good composer and why people should listen to you? So you have to make up a load of guff basically Oh and you need a photograph I don't photograph well There's only two pictures of me in existence that I like and believe it or not. That's one of them So you've got to sort of go you think that doing the music is the sort of the end of the journey It's that's and then it starts getting hard work and you've then got to start promoting it You've got to start writing tracks now because these are quite experimental things Just listening to it. You probably won't know what's going on So I had to write a full page about each piece explaining the process that I was doing Had to create some low quality mp3s with some watermarks in so I could put it on a few dodgy sites Had to create the high quality ones for apple But oh and putting them in an order The order I came up with is not the order that they're in the album The order they're in the album is ones that I thought worked best With shorter tracks then longer tracks and a kind of an actual sort of ebb and flow to it Well, I've probably still got it wrong and this is the sort of track information. I mean I had to write Yeah, I was not kidding. It is computer-y So after all of this I still had to release it So it's available on apple and bandcamp. I would say go and get it from bandcamp if you want to listen to it Because I'd rather get no money than apple gets some I think I guess So Conclusions are it's 10% inspiration 90% perspiration But I found for this it's 1% because there are so many false avenues You start going down one way and so often you just turn back and go this is just not working. I have to try something else You got learn arrangements, which I've never had to do before Music business is painful It's called a business for a reason. It's because only people that like doing business are in it And that that opening section of that piece that has got the orchestra tuning up I put one of my pieces on youtube as an example piece and they said you're using samples No, it's an orchestra tuning up. It's from a sample library. I own but they still blocked it So I had to go back and re-edit and do more stuff and then obviously be realistic about the stuff I think it's the best symphony I've ever written. I mean of the one symphony I've written. It's the best symphony I've written But no one else is probably going to think that so I I can't sit go and think I've done it Where's my island? Which island shall I buy off Richard Branson this time? realistically speaking There's only about five people that do this stuff. So let me update my fosdenf scorecard There we go, and I've probably got one minute for questions Thanks for your talk Do we have some questions? Yeah, okay Have you tried making also music with deep neural networks? Have I tried making that music with neural networks? Not yet But if you if there's a feedback form say steve was very good and maybe next year He'll have some neural nets. It's the thing. I've seen I've looked the look of but I've not tried it yet Uh, what beer are you drinking? What beer? This is waterloo. Okay Yeah What do you think the advantage of making music like this is? Or uh, what what are the advantages? Why create music like this? So why create music like this is probably the easier question to answer is because I can I had this idea. I thought what does it sound like? What if I this is the only way I'm going to hear it? No one else is going to do it unless I do it So I went away and did it Maybe if I waited long enough someone else probably in this room would have the same idea and then they'd write that symphony for me But because no one was I did it The first question of what are the benefits of doing it this way? I don't know It's the only way I know of making that music because it is so precise the timing is so accurate It has to be done this way You think you're expressing something of yourself in this? Do I think I'm expressing myself in this? Yes, but it might not be an emotional expression It might be the intellectual expression of look how clever I am because I can write this library and I can come up with these Clever ideas There might not be an emotional thing and you might not get any emotional state from this type of music Thanks, everybody All done. Okay. Thanks again