A busy day yesterday. After 4 (or 6?) weeks of constant work, I feel I'm finally making progress on the music.
First, in the morning yesterday I glued up the second 2M length of wood for framing Love and Wifi, more on this can wait, then started on music. The first thing to do was tidy up Entwined in Infinity, at last, this long and complex track which was the cause of perhaps 2 weeks alone of difficulty, ultimately due to a clash between the expression and expressive timing of live play, and direct sequencing because, I thought, at first, of making the music strings-based rather than involving piano. The more piano I added, however, the better it sounded. This was partly due to the timing and expression, not just the timbre of the piano, so many of my programming changes were about capturing and preserving that.
At some point in the past I added a feature to import the timing of a MIDI sequence (that is the timing of each note in a performance, nothing to do with tempo) and match this to sequencer timing: timing! That most expressive of qualities in music. So, the timing of a live performance could effectively be separated from everything else and reproduced. My recent changes have allowed control over the volume (even each note) separately again, and controls over the other MIDI controllers, which I never had.
One of the ideas for Entwined in Infinity was to use flutes and high strings in left/right ears like a dialogue between two philosophers voices (this is the meaning of the music). I thought it would be nice to make it possible to record those in MIDI rather than my sequencing, so this is now possible. I've had a MIDI export for some time, but using it to actually play and record things is another matter, a lot of data needs to be controlled, and best done live unless you want something to sound like an ancient Nintendo console.
Most of yesterday's changes were minor; changes to instruments and balancing, and adding new, more electronic, timbres. I also did some scant work on Freud's Lecture, I think that's complete.
Much of the day was spent recording the music from 'A Midsummer Day's Dream' - our homage to Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke poem, which I performed at the Midsummer's Day event in Congleton. I'll probably rename this to The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, which makes sense.
A lot of the day then was subsumed with infinite tiredness, and I could barely move after 3pm. Deb and I were due to head to Bristol today for a long weekend, but this has been cancelled. We'll have some hours this weekend as some sort of holiday.
It was only in the evening that I heard that the queen had died, a sudden shock to the nation despite her advanced years. It made me recall the dream I had a few days ago where I murdered King Charles I with a knife, then went on the run as the 'new king' Louis, but I felt that the police would surround and catch me sooner or later, and not fall for the 'he who kills the king becomes the king' defence.
Today, so far, some more and hopefully final programming changes. I've added the option to export a sequence of data (velocities, or any parameter data) as a list, but across several tracks and in time-order; and import that too. This will hopefully help with Empathy With Daisies. There are two key differences between the live version and the sequenced version: the notes in the live overlap a little, and the hugely important and variable velocity from live playing. Now I should have the tools to control those elements and apply them to a sequence... so I can import the emotion from one live performance and apply it, note-by-note, to a pre-typed sequence.
This isn't very efficient; it's better to play it live, but it gives me more options and control if I need it.
