Soft Machine³ - Arts Tech and Other

Quiet Scary Piano Noise 24 mins (2004) by Richard Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

• This sort of sound is ideal for use as “incidental music” in a scary film.
  
• It was created by recording acoustic piano noise, then processing the noise digitally.
  
• This genre of “music” got its start in the late 1940s.

Wikipedia - Musique concrète

Musique concrète (French for “concrete music” or “real music”), is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sonorities derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as “musical” (melody, harmony, rhythm, metre and so on). The theoretical underpinnings of the aesthetic were developed by Pierre Schaeffer, beginning in the late 1940s.

Stream the audio right off Archive.org with the player, or go there to download it

Quiet Scary Piano Noise 24 mins (Low Wet Panning)

Mirages – Audio CD

Improvised Compositions in Real Time by Richard Walker Performed live on a Kurzweil PC88-mx synthesizer

This track doesn’t sound like an improvisation, but trust me, it is. It takes too liong to end given its length, for example.

Still, it has all the elements: theme, harmony, progression, variation.

Richard Walker - Mirages_13_v4

Arabesques & Lucid Dreams – Audio CD

Improvised Compositions in Real Time by Richard Walker Performed live on a Kurzweil PC88-mx synthesizer

Track XX is so titled because of a track numbering confusion. Who cares, really? The gist is this: more fun with the “built-in” synthesizer delay. In addition to other benefits, I find using a delay helps you keep strict(er) time - without the use of a metronome.

Richard Walker - Arabesques_XX_v4

One Hundred Two and ½ - Suite for Piano - for 88 keys, 8 fingers, 2 thumbs, 2 feet and 2½ pedals

N.B.  “2½ pedals” refers to the damper, the soft pedal, and the grand piano’s sostenuto pedal.

This piece hasn’t gotten beyond the concept phase, but it did already yield some good improvisation.

In addition it helped me think a little differently when trying to work out a musical dialect. There isn’t so much one scale here, it’s more like one scale per chord. So passages that cross chords need to “modulate” to another scale for the duration of the chord.

Due to the symmetrical nature of the octatonic scale, this is not too hard.

There are really only 6 octatonic scales, 3 being different only in whether you start with a half or whole step. The octatonic scale is 4 pairs of [half step, whole step] or [whole step, half step].

As a practical matter, the 6-note sub-classes can be treated as 2 grouips of 3, one for each hand. This technique makes these scales surprisingly easy to play. Also, the scales really become extended harmony chords themselves, and end up blurring the answer to “what is a chord vs. what is a scale?”

You can hear some of that applied to the keyboard in the enclosed audio.

Richard Walker - Improv - 102OneHalf_20020927_Track_02

Debussy’s Mis takes by Richard Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This is another piece that was put together for Robert Elvin’s film. This time, I received the clarinet and bass parts recorded previously. I then added a piano part, recorded it and mixed the audio together.

Sheet music is avaliable in PDF format at Free-scores.com

Stream the audio right off Archive.org with the player, or go there to download it

Debussy's Mis takes