Scores Complete

A full day out yesterday, and today completed The Love Symphony scores. Tomorrow, Deb and I will go to Congleton Library's 'Good Vibrations' session. I'm considering taking a guitar rather than keyboard, for reasons of practice.

There Is No Love Score

More long, long tedious work on the scores today. In the afternoon, after completing the last 'Encounter With the Believers', 'Stroking The Harp' and the Awakening Sonata, I thought I'd completed all 9 tracks in draft, but realised that the first one, 'There Is No Love...', was a first, unused version. I wrote that piece first, but later made a second edit and dramatically changed the structure, and ultimately used that version. If only I'd checked that first!

All of this music is difficult and complex to score. It feels like a student exercise and I feel a little overwhelmed with it, spotting errors and things to fix - this is good, it shows progress, but it does mean that things are taking far longer than I'd hoped. Still, my only major task for the month is this, as planned. The program changes to Prometheus are brilliant.

Mr Tarplee commented that I could perhaps use AI for these. It would be a long time before AI was sophisticated enough to do this. Take the arpeggios for example. These are best played as a root note on a synthesiser with the arpeggio programmed. No way would an AI think of that, it would perhaps score each note, but in this case that's not as useful. For this reason, my main score to 'Loneliness And Divine Love' has just the root note, and a separate score with the arpeggios to program. I have, however, also made a full score with each note.

I hope I don't waste too much time on this, but for me it is partly a matter of growth into a new skill too. One day, these scores might be all that remains of the music. On that day, this work becomes priceless.

Valentines and Arpeggio Scoring

A very busy Valentines Day yesterday, starting with a trip to Wrexham to collect my painting from Ty Pawb, plus a walk around the town. It's a larger than Crewe, though about as desolate; somewhat similar in many ways. The Primark shop was the most deserted of any I've been in, a nice thing for a shopper. The mass and tangle of the Chester store is an unpleasant contrast.

After that, a brief attempt at scoring 'Loneliness And Divine Love'. It has many automatic arpeggios which are a pain to transcribe. The simple arpeggio in 'The Dream' was bad enough. The primary saw-wave lead, audible from the start, has two arpeggios: 0-3-7, and 0-12-0-7 and half that speed. So I calculated the note offsets:

So, it's a sequence of 24 notes. The root note changes per chord, so calculating the actual note from a certian root would be nightmarish and tedious. This shows the power of electronic composition to some extent. Nobody (Schoenberg?) would score this complex sequence of semitone offsets, yet it's simple in its core. Complex though this is, it is simpler than the sequence for the bass, which also shifts in timing. It is 0-0-12 in semitone pattern (3/4) but the timing shifts between half-beats and whole beats every two beats. When running it does strange things that I can't exactly score, perhaps due to electronic nuance and the way the timing is calculated. I'll try.

All of this is near impossible to manually score note-by-note, so I started to program a feature into Prometheus which would generate the correct note from a sequence of arpeggio offsets. So, I can feed it 0-3-7 plus a timing of half-a-beat, and it would run through a track, and finding a C would generate C-E-G-C-E-G and so on, until it hits the next note. This works, and will allow me to transcribe these complex arpeggios. I've no idea how anyone else does this, or if anyone else does this. I'm doing it because nobody else does, or can.

I started programming yesterday, but had to dash out to the launch of the Crewe Art Trail, a town event for the next few months of which my mural is a part. It was at the new Crewe Create Hub, and was a nice social event, although we couldn't stay for more than 45 minutes or so.

Then, a nice meal and evening with Deb, and completion of the programming today. I can choose to cycle the arpeggio sequence (note and timing) or choose either at random, so this can be used for interesting and unexpected types of music generation.

Now to score that most difficult of tunes.

The Love Symphony Score Day 2

An unusually lovely sleep. I dreamt of writing a book about sleep, and composed several chapters, only to annoyingly wake up and realised I'd merely dreamt it! One of the chapters was a rhyme about counting sheep. I must write this book!

Today has been a long and hard, but satisfying, day scoring The Love Symphony music. I've now completed four tracks in draft: 'There Is No Love', 'Sunset', 'The Dream', and the last, 'The Eventual Attainment Of Love'. There's a lot to do, and sometimes compromise. There are always parts that can't be scored, or are complex to score.

Most of today was spent working on 'The Dream'. One part is an arpeggio melody with a tinkly timbre. This plays notes at fixed semitone intervals: 0, 0, 7, 0, -12, 12, 7, -12, 0, 12, -5, 0; always in cycle, changing once per 500ms irrespective of the song tempo, but the root note (and reset to the timing) changes regularly. Rather than scoring that, I've scored a simpler arpeggio in glockenspiel of 0, 0, 7 ,0. For timbre, I'm unsure if this compromise is necessary or a good idea, but it does sound closer to the original - my question: should I be matching that, or writing something new and ideal for this new format? I'll make note about the 'actual' recorded notes. There is also a mock-choral part, synthesized 'Aah' choirs. I've notated the notes of these 3 and 4-note chords painstakingly, listing this as a synth part. Again, these are not exactly necessary for playing the well orchestrally; it sounds fine without them. Should I be making something to play, or as an exact record of what the recording's notes are? I'm trying to do both, placing notes in different instruments if needed, so that they are there in some form.

The day started by finishing the last track 'The Eventual Attainment Of Love'. A synth part which plays 7ths (ahem, 5ths that is, to you proper musicians) was redirected into horns (low note) and strings (upper note). The cello had little to do and I felt sorry for it, so I made much of the main melody alternate between cello and viola; the pair pass the music back and forth throughout the tune, a melodic friendship which was a joy to put together. This is beyond what's in the recording, but matches its spirit. Is that my ideal?

The next track is the 'sonata'; though technically it's more like a concerto for piano and harp. This too is a complex piece. Every one takes hours and hours, though joyful ones. I'm reminded why I've decided to notate my albums over the next decade. I could easily take a full-time year to notate them all; if I did nothing else.

Love Symphony Scoring

Charged into scoring The Love Symphony today. It's a tedious and time consuming process, but absorbing. The fact it's evenly sequenced in Prometheus means I can export a MIDI file and work from that. The first and last tracks are the largest; around 10 minutes each, and big enough for full orchestra.

My 'strings' sounds range from low to high, so I must split them between instruments to fit. For 'There Is No Love, and the More I Search the Less I Find' this means 3 violin parts, 1 viola, 1 violoncello, and a bass. The 'brass' is split between a horn and trumpet, which is close though not quite ideal. The brass in the recording is a little like a mix of the two, it's more horn, not so squeaky as a trumpet, but the pitch is rather high. The high notes for the horn and for the flute are right at the limit.

But it fits, it works, it sounds good in preview. I'm scoring with sadness that this is unlikely to ever be performed, and even less so in my lifetime, but a first step is to do this. As with everything I score, it's given me a new appreciation of the music. The end track 'The Eventual Attainment of Love' is much more efficient in composition, so compact by comparison, and loaded with joy. I remember it flying from my virtual pen, writing it's big, chunky sections in no time at all.

Argus v1.52, 20x20, New Paths

Today, updated Argus to v1.52, adding some simple logic to resize the screen with a dynamic quantity of tracks, and markers for sections.

Then entered the 20x20 exhibition at Castle Park Arts Centre. I wanted to take part, so looked for surfaces and registered. When registering I found that I had to enter the titles of the works, so used 'Wikiquote' and the Random feature to find 4 random titles: 'The Magic Of Drama', 'So Many Profound Ways', 'Repercussions Of The Decline', and 'The Days Of Kronos'. This was useful and unexpected. After that, I toned and cut a 40x50cm canvas into four 20x20cm squares, ready for painting. I felt like painting there and then, but was was too dark and too late to start.

I completed the writing about black holes, and considered future goals. I've completed about half of my 2025 goals already. I need more ambition. One key element in art is the love of it. If I create an artwork that gives me comfort and relief from the troubling world; it will do the same for the viewer. Similarly with joy, wonder, or any other feeling; so what we do in life must be done with joy. For me, my joy often follows my actions, I don't follow it; I'm a master of becoming enthusiastic, and I can find anything and everything interesting.

Passion must be stoked to grow.

A Shell Universe: Black Holes And The Big Bang

I had an insight about the universe and its expansion, even an idea about its origins, what happened before the Big Bang.

Black Holes

This stemmed from my belief, stated here before, that black holes are not what is normally considered to be a black hole. That is, not a dense core of mass, like a heavy planet or star, so dense that light cannot escape it’s gravity. My problem with this idea is that if light cannot escape, then nothing can, and if nothing can escape then nothing can fall in either, as that would create a one-way sink; a pit of permanent removal from the universe.

I also don’t accept that a gravitational singularity, or any infinity or point of infinity can exist in the universe; for if one infinite thing should exist, infinity would take hold and everything would become infinite; time space, light, energy, to the extent that nothing could exist except infinity. Atoms via quantum mechanics avoid this very problem elegantly by flickering between existence and non-existence at the correct rate. Any expectation of actual infinity is a flaw in any theory which should predict it, eg. General Relativity.

Stephen Hawking predicted a solution to my black hole anxieties here, at least, where Hawking Radiation emits from the black hole. We will set this aside for now.

For me, if space beyond the event horizon is not accessible, then it does not exist, it is simply a convex boundary to our space. Upon formation, all of the mass of a black hole is pushed outwards to just beyond its event horizon, and it remains there like a shell. The centre of gravity would remain central. From the perspective of this shell, it is a point that happens to be quite large; it has nothing ‘behind it’. The hole of the black hole is literally nothing, and an object falling towards it would be absorbed, crushed, deflected into the shell and never further.

I thought about the growth and shrinkage of this shell. I wondered how this might relate to the universe itself. What if the universe itself was a shell like this, expanding from a collapsed black hole?

Another dimension would be required, the universe would be shell shaped, objects on the surface of a sphere. Objects would move apart as the sphere expanded. One difference between this model and the conventional view is that looking far enough away, we would see our backs, akin to travelling around the surface of the Earth.

The relation of this to the origin of the Big Bang is that a collapsing black hole as big as the entire universe may cause this expansion. Being a collapsed real object, a former universe, perhaps in the style Roger Penrose conceived, would have pseudo-random elements, not be perfectly symmetrical. Different forces would be at play at different sizes, as they are for the boiling matter of stellar objects.

In terms of expansion, objects would move apart at the same relative rates, that is, if the universe doubled in expansion by either method, objects would be twice as far apart. What differences might we detect in a shell-universe?

First, the ultimate origin of the expansion force, and the force of gravitational attraction which applies to the whole universe to counteract the expansion would have a different origin, not in the universe itself but at the heart of the ‘null sphere’. This would mean that distant parts of the universe would be able to communicate gravitationally faster than they would normally appear to be able to, across the sphere rather than only around the sphere’s circumference. Thus the speed of light may appear to be faster; specifically and at most the difference between the diameter and half a circumference, that is pi/2-1, or 57.0796% faster, at most 470,912,891 m/s.

Second, there may be a thickness to the shell-universe. It can’t be infinitely thin, there can be no-more zero than infinity. It may be as thin as thin can be, the thickness of a Planck-length, or it may be thicker, cosmological. If thick, then how may this manifest itself? Some parts of the universe would appear to be expanding faster than others because the ‘outer’ objects would expand faster than the ‘inner’ ones. The speed differences can be predicted based on the ‘thickness’ of this shell. The objects on the outer edge would be moving faster than those on the inner, so the thickness would increase over time; this would be necessary because there would be more surface area on the outer edge to make up. We would see objects in one plane (sideways, along the circumference) distorted compared to looking at the slightly older objects in the lower, smaller edge.

Music Pack Filing, Curtain Cutting

When it comes to any form of success, no amount of brilliance can offset the downsides of social isolation, just as no amount of idiocy or incompetence can harm the popular.

A steady day of work. Before 12:30 I completed the Flatspace Music Pack, set up the store, compiled the tracks and tested them in game, uploaded the artwork and descriptions. After that, I cut the velvet cloth for the keyboard stand drape. It is, I predict, 50mm or so too long because I forgot to account for the gap between the keyboard stand's top and the location of the curtain rod. My mother is adamant that there's no need to re-cut, though it's not difficult. I'm resigned to fate regarding correcting it. My life experience is having no control over anything. Perhaps this is why fate and determinism is my obsession.

The curtain might never be used anyway, and is only a small part of our performances which number one or two per year, usually unpaid and to minuscule audiences; brilliant though we think our performances are. Who would be there to comment on the beauty and perfection of the violet velvet curtain? We must try our best, stoic and careful, each a tiny bit better than before. What more can we do but our best?

A life of performing is hardly satisfying; a life gone in the poof that is human memory. Even so few as one per month would soon drive me mad. Some aritsts like the applause of an audience of strangers but it means nothing to me at all, my only goal is self-improvement.

The day has flown, and on the 10th I've nearly completed all of my monthly goals. I must manifest new ones. Every day my feelings weep and I battle to soothe and reassure them. Making any sort of progress as a human is about the conquest of feelings. We are social in ourselves because we are a collective of cells. When we are alone, we are not alone.