I made a composition today I was wondering if anyone else is working on something with music composition. I'm just getting started. This is my first attempt with a plan in mind for it.
That must have been a fun project, nice job. It seems kind of like you had an idea for a procedural composition method, as opposed to say an idea or concept of the experience yielded by the composition itself, correct?
A loooong time ago I created soundtracks for websites & interactive CD-ROMs for various corporations. The mindset was functionally opposite in that case but it was fun to receive a concept for the outcome and then work to match that concept. Tooling could be whatever it needed to be. Pay was calculated by the second, which was new to me. :-)
Actually surprising no on the first (edit oops, second) count. The procedure wasn't really based on an algo rather just feelings in my head.
After painstakingly going through so many samples finding the bad ones I got accustomed to their sounds. I learned the ranges of the orchestra from the ranges provided by the Philharmonia orchestra.
My first attempt at composition was just tossing around notes until it turned into a blob of doom sound which I wasn't really happy with.
I watched a presentation on intonation and got a better feel for why harmonics sound as good as they do.
I watched the Philharmonia's presentation series on Bartok (I'm kind of a fan of Bartok) and got a better feel for where his rhythm came from by viewing the folk dance performances he was inspired by. I didn't end up with a folk dance though. I made a rhythm in F# almost like morse code and it helped me treat the composition like putting meat on the skeleton of the rhythm.
After the melody was complete I was shocked at how bad it sounded compared as a string quartet to the piano version. So I shifted the one note rhythm octaves and forwards backwards fifths to get F# on B. I also ditched strings and did woodwinds and the flute and I think it sounded a lot more pleasant.
That was better but the range of the melody was not taking good advantage of the pallet of instruments I could use.
So it was a simple matter of selecting the notes in the piano roll for the melody and shifting them until they were in better agreement with a harmonic.
The process from start to finish took about 4 hours.
A loooong time ago I created soundtracks for websites & interactive CD-ROMs for various corporations. The mindset was functionally opposite in that case but it was fun to receive a concept for the outcome and then work to match that concept. Tooling could be whatever it needed to be. Pay was calculated by the second, which was new to me. :-)