Anything and everything about MIDI - arp, mapper, mangler, generator, chorder, controller, utility, fx etc.

[David]

My feeling is the M31 is very complex and would take time to produce anything resembling music.

In general I very much agree that randomness and pure maths aren't the best at producing musical results unless they also have some built-in music theory smarts…or can be sent on to apps/plugins that do, which is pretty easy. But I've always gotten the most immediately useful output by sticking mainly with apps that start out musical rather than math-y or random-based, then let me mess about with their output, maybe by using math-y and random options, but even more likely, if the messing about is also theory-based, as is, say, EZ-Keys, or RapidComposer, which can both send any MIDI file through any chords. Any DAW with a chord track should be as useful, but I gather that not all "chord tracks" have the same powers:)

DAWS I know that are great at musical MIDI manipulations are Logic with all its MIDI FX, Live Studio with Max 4 Live, and Reason with all its RE's and use as a plugin in other DAWS. OpusModus is the best app example I know of that blends very deep pure maths and computer concepts with a totally music-oriented purpose, but it's way expensive and super complex.

I know there are other AI and math-y type music creation tools (as opposed to all the many MIDI-manipulating ones mainly featured in this thread), but as I like to stay as genre-free as possible, I'm perfectly delighted still with both RC and EZ-Keys, both of which are less $$$, as far as I know, than any other music-generating or "creation" apps, all of which that I've looked at seem VERY genre oriented. I'd say EZ-Keys is the best blend of genre and non-genre approaches for the money that I've found, since it's both a manipulator and a creator device, plus it's dead simple.

But no doubt I'm not typical in being uninterested in any particular genre (and explicitly DIS-interested in most current pop genres), so my evaluations are likely not all that relevant to many readers here.

I must say that IMO the best MIDI FX bang for the buck is any sort of device that offers per-note probability as an option. Often just dropping out a note or adding one in at odd moments can breathe an amazing amount of life into any MIDI file.

Speed and ease of interactivity also seem to me super important features for any MIDI tool to have, genre-oriented or not, so you can instantly see and fix anything your generator/manipulator is throwing out that doesn't suit, without having to re-gen or reset anything. Which is one reason DAWs are so useful in this area.

[fairlyclose]

The soniclab products are heavily driven by music theory. The dev makes that pretty explicit. Might not be the sort of music theory you like or use, but it is still a well respected and very influential theory

[David]

The soniclab products are heavily driven by music theory. The dev makes that pretty explicit. Might not be the sort of music theory you like or use, but it is still a well respected and very influential theory

I do look forward to checking Cosmosf M31 out, asap!

The screenshot of the interface simply looks more like Spiral in Reaktor on math-heavy steroids than a staff or piano-roll to me, so I made the assumption that I'd be likely to agree with the Kid about easy musicality not being a feature. But NOT made unwilling to look by that assumption:)

What different sorts of music theory are you referring to? No matter the genre, I'm referring to traditional western theory in its current form (not just classical era, IOW), as it seems to me all the various MIDI tools I've either used or read about, do, too, no matter how much they rely on maths and/or randomness. I'd be very interested to hear about MIDI tools based on others!
Do you mean Eastern stuff, like gamelan or raga based?

[fairlyclose]

The soniclab products are heavily driven by music theory. The dev makes that pretty explicit. Might not be the sort of music theory you like or use, but it is still a well respected and very influential theory

I do look forward to checking Cosmosf M31 out, asap!

The screenshot of the interface simply looks more like Spiral in Reaktor on math-heavy steroids than a staff or piano-roll to me, so I made the assumption that I'd be likely to agree with the Kid about easy musicality not being a feature. But NOT made unwilling to look by that assumption:)

What different sorts of music theory are you referring to? No matter the genre, I'm referring to traditional western theory in its current form (not just classical era, IOW), as it seems to me all the various MIDI tools I've either used or read about, do, too, no matter how much they rely on maths and/or randomness. I'd be very interested to hear about MIDI tools based on others!
Do you mean Eastern stuff, like gamelan or raga based?

Xenakis . But western theory seems very narrowly interpreted here and say at VI -control as well. For example the way a composer like Aaron Cassidy talks about music is completely absent from any forum I've come across yet he is an important mid career composer.

[David]

I get you now, thanks:)

By music theory in this thread I just mean, at the simplest level, any software that speaks about, offers, and works with chords, scales, keys, staves, time and key signatures, and that sort of basic stuff that you'd maybe never heard of unless you took piano as a kid or a music 101 class in college! Almost none of the m4l stuff does that, but it's still really great for MIDI manipulation. And some m4l stuff is all about that sort of thing.

I think of what modern composers and average kvr music makers might actually be doing/making as more about music aesthetics than theory, as far as this thread is concerned, and as my own interests are, too, for that matter.

OpusModus is an interesting example, in that it's as "serious modern music" oriented as software can be, yet it's SO wide open and packed with both math and coding tools AND basic and not-basic traditional theory tools (that you can use or ignore), it's pretty much ready to do ANYthing. But the most immediate impression a user would get of what people are doing with it, IMO, is that it's clearly a genre-oriented tool, the genre being "modern serious", full of tools for Xenakis-inspired compositions along with many other modern composers, using whatever remakes of "music theory" anyone is using now or has recently used.

Footnote: I did take a few college courses in music in the late 60's, and the thing I most remember from music theory courses is hearing on the first day that theory is simply the result of analyzing what musicians have done AFTER they do it, not a set of rules for what musicians ought to be doing and knowing all about before they even get started. So it's both a useful history AND always in revision. Just like language is always being changed simply by how people use it.

But since it's such a deep, detailed history of what has been done, it's often confused as being primarily a set of rules for how to do "real music", drawing on the discoveries of long-dead musicians who changed the history and development of musical forms, which we still may or may not have any real interest in using ourselves.

[fairlyclose]

Agree re the misunderstanding of theory. Thanks for the opusmodus mention, I will check it out

[David]

It struck me after I posted that, that genres are in fact precisely examples of music theory in action: The hardening into rules of things some current musicians have already done that distinguish them from other groups doing different things, and once hardened then become available to anybody to pick and choose between who wants to do something similar. Only these days, the tools for making and for sharing both the work and the rules, may no longer depend as much on the basic "old-timey" tools I described above (keys, staves, signatures), or at least there are now additional new tools (MIDI files, arpeggiators, sequencers, DAW files, etc.) for that, that should equally be considered "music theory", which is as much a tool for showing how to do something as for recording how it was done.

Also, maybe it makes more sense to call the basics of theory I referred to earlier (chords, scales, keys, staves, time and key signatures) something like "theory-based tools", as opposed to theory in general, which certainly includes genres, styles, and anything new composers might come up with to craft their sound. These basic tools are almost only about musical notation, but just enough more complex than that, that I don't think that term (notation) can cover them.

[WatchTheGuitar]

Is it easiest to think in terms of subtraction or addition when setting up music theory rules?
And doesn’t genre always have loads of exceptions so a bit more nebulous in definition?

[David]

I've never set up any rules for music making, personally, so I dunno:)

And, yeah, certainly "genre" doesn't equal "theory"; I just find genres good examples of theory in action as defined by my professor back in the 60s. Probably a more practical definition of music theory would be whatever is in the most current text books on the subject that are even trying to be up to date. IOW, whatever's approved by academia as "worth-mentioning" as current music theory. That would be a less-useful definition for me, but no doubt closer to the "true" meaning IRL!

[David]

Another aspect of Music Theory that intrigues me most, actually, is how much great music has been made by going beyond the current "rules" or not even knowing any rules, and how much has been made by taking advantage of the great analytical work done by music theoreticians and professors, and other students of great music already made?

EG: Before the Circle of Fifths was a thing in books and courses, presumably some great musician was using it consciously or unconsciously, just by ear rather than by thinking it up one day, and maybe some other musician heard their work and did recognize it as diagrammable, making a diagram (probably a lot of discarded ones along the way), and inspiring other musicians to do similar things sound-wise, just by hearing it in use.(Maybe somebody knows the history about this, or maybe not; I don't. (Maybe Pythagorus invented it and I need a better example!))

No matter; once it was diagrammed and shared, so many have found it a powerful tool for making many generations worth of different genres and unique sounds from it, and much of this music might never have come about without it.

So, in this way theory can go beyond being either just history or a set of rules, or a sharing tool, and becomes an ACTUAL tool for making new music, built on older but still pertinent theories and rules, and making new ones on top of the old ones.

[David]

OK, from Wikipedia, not read before posting above!:

"Some sources imply that Pythagoras invented the circle of fifths in the sixth century B.C. but there is no proof of this.[6][7][8] Pythagoras was primarily concerned with the theoretical science of harmonics and is credited with having devised a system of tuning based upon the interval of a fifth, but did not tune more than eight notes, and left no written records of his work.[9]

In the late 1670s Ukrainian composer and theorist Nikolay Diletsky wrote a treatise on composition entitled Grammatika, "the first of its kind, aimed at teaching a Russian audience how to write Western-style polyphonic compositions." It taught how to write kontserty, polyphonic a cappella works usually based on liturgical texts and created by putting together musical sections with contrasting rhythm, meter, melodic material and vocal groupings. Diletsky intended his treatise to be a guide to composition using rules of music theory. The first circle of fifths appears in the Grammatika and it was used for students as a composition tool."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths

[David]

Nikolay Diletsky was reincarnated as Mel Bay on February 25, 1913.
From the dpcpipedia

[WatchTheGuitar]

I didn’t get much further than Bert Weedon, that when I started playing guitar I could fake most songs with a very limited number of chords. Still my main approach

[Kalamata Kid]

But western theory seems very narrowly interpreted here and say at VI -control as well. For example the way a composer like Aaron Cassidy talks about music is completely absent from any forum I've come across yet he is an important mid career composer.

Hmmm! Aaron Cassidy is far out!
Ekmeles performing "A Painter of Figures in Rooms" by Aaron Cassidy
(Y)outube.com/watch?v=apjsagHySlE"
I like this piece but will I ever actively seek to hear it again?

[Kalamata Kid]

nm