There are many people who would enjoy composing and arranging music, but don't know where to start or have barely begun. Does that describe you? Is there a voice inside you aching to be heard as music?
Maybe I can help. I'm a programmer who's spent the last 14 years developing software to help musicians write and arrange music. "Oh, bore," you're thinking. "How could a programmer help anyone compose music?"
Well, the first thing to realize is how your computer can help you compose music. It will play anything you write, whether it's a masterpiece or just random notes; it's quite nonjudgmental. It will pull together a top-rate little band of virtual musicians, or even a big orchestra, to play through your score as many times as you want, and it will tirelessly let you change the score and master recording as often as you want. It's also a professional music engraver who knows all of the rules, such as when note stems are supposed to go up or down, and how to space out the notes on the score.
I'd like this blog to foster a conversation with the tiny musicians hiding in your computer, ready to assist you in your music making. It will show you how to get them to work for you -- no beer required.
This blog will also solicit your advice on how music software and hardware can be improved, as though you were telling those musicians in your computer how they ought to improve their skills to better serve you. How will that work? Well, I probably won't be the only music software developer who will be implementing your ideas in a next major release.
Perhaps a good way for us to get started is with this question: What would you like to do musically, and how could computers make that easier? Please leave your suggestions below.
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Interesting Parallels:
When an artist is preparing the canvas, so much effort is required in the initial sketch, composition, and arrangements of ideas. Frequently many studies, sketches, thumbnails are created and arranged on the canvas before even one brush stroke is applied.
As a software engineer, the approach to great design requires a commitment to knowledge of the requirements and an investment in careful analysis and design. Hours of discussion combined with "time to think." Domain experts are consulted, and ideas are presented, recast, reconstructed, and rehashed over and over again. Then prototypes and visual concepts are introduced even before one single line of code is written.
The parallels are fascinating when you think of how one approaches a musical composition. We often equate the process as a linear, beginning to end procedure (and granted, for some composers this is frequently the case). Little musical thoughts are scratched out over time. Collections of sketches and ideas accumulate. The creative process is sometimes triggered by musical colors and sounds or an idea or inspiration from a painting, landscape, memory, relationship, etc. The form of the piece is considered and the harmonic structure. The style of the piece and its relationship to the composer's artistic vision. So much goes into the layout of the piece before the implementation of the actual composition is pulled together. Just as a software engineer pulls in code snippets and libraries, so does the composer pull together musical sketches and ideas from his/her memory or sketch book.
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Rob
Hello Rob,
> Mark, I envy your position. I've been a software
> engineer for 9 years now. I have a Master's degree
> in music and taught at the high school level for 5
> years prior to my entry into the software industry.
If you're envious of working on music software, and you're a software engineer, maybe we should talk. I'm looking for a software developer with deep music knowledge. Send me an email at markwa@notation.com
> I love composition and wish that I had more time
> for it. As you probably know, after a long day at
> the keyboard hacking out code, it is rather
> challenging ot sit at the computer all night with a
> tool like Finale or Sibelius.
Please take a look at my Notation Composer at www.notation.com. It is especially well-optimized for the activity of composing. I originally started the project 15 years ago because then, like now, Finale was best suited for desktop publishing of a score for music one had already scribbled down on paper. Although some composers and arrangers use Finale and Sibelius during the heat of the moment of composing, neither of those products are very good for that. Notation Composer is. For example, you can improvise at your MIDI keyboard, and Notation Composer will immediately notate your improvisation. You can then copy, paste, change notes, etc. You don't have to laboriously enter the notes by hand. Yeah, Finale and Sibelius also transcribe MIDI to notation, but Notation Composer's transcription far surpasses that of Finale and Sibelius, even though Notation Composer sells for $87.99. It sounds too good to be true; but try it yourself. For example, feed Notation Composer any MIDI file where the author has paid attention to the MIDI metronome, and compare Notation Composer's transcription with that of Finale or Sibelius.
> My preference, is to take a piece as far as I can
> at the piano and then at that point where my script
> is almost unrecognizable, I decide that I'd better
> get it into Finale (currently the software I use).
That's the way I used to work, until I started using Notation Composer.
Cheers
-- Mark
Mark, I envy your position. I've been a software engineer for 9 years now. I have a Master's degree in music and taught at the high school level for 5 years prior to my entry into the software industry. I love composition and wish that I had more time for it. As you probably know, after a long day at the keyboard hacking out code, it is rather challenging ot sit at the computer all night with a tool like Finale or Sibelius. My preference, is to take a piece as far as I can at the piano and then at that point where my script is almost unrecognizable, I decide that I'd better get it into Finale (currently the software I use). My big wish is playback. I use the 2004 version and know that much improvement has been made in the 2009 version. I am not as familiar with Sibelius. Anyway, I appreciated reading your blog. I thought I was one of the few artist/musicians that hammer out code by day and musical charts by night.
Best Regards,
Rob
The most popular auto-composing tool for common styles of music is Band-in-a-Box, by PG Music. You can choose among many hundreds of alternative music styles (e.g., country, hip hop, jazz), as well as the tempo and key (scale). For happy versus sad, those of us in western cultures choose, respectively, the major or minor key.
Band-in-a-Box generates both the melody and a four or five instrument accompaniment, including percussion.
The community of academic musicians also have developed several auto-composing tools for advant garde music.
Hi, I would like my computer to compose for me. It would be nice to just give some numbers like tempo and scale (maybe even sad or happy). Then you could just make the computer to propose different sequences on from which you could choose the best one. After making several different sequences that please me, I could but them in the order that suits my purposes and the computer would stitch them up to one piece.
Is there programs like this? I really need one =)
Mark,
I believe you misunderstood my comment. Still, if it spawned a new blog!
All the best,
Peter
I couldn't let this one go either, Peter-- so much so that your comment prompted me to write a separate blog post on the subject: Can Software Be a Subsititute for Raw Musical Talent?" Of course, my answer to that question is yes. What else would one expect me to say, as a developer of software for musicians?
Software can help a musician uncover talent he doesn't realize he has.
I do appreciate the spirit of your comment, Peter, which places high value on the raw musical talent that's out there. Cheers -- Mark
Just can't let this one go like that, Mark:
>a talent and skill envied by many, including myself.
It's absolutely no substitute for raw musical talent, however!
All the best,
Peter
Thanks, Peter, for cross-polinating this blog with Daniel Spreadbury's at Sibelius. I look forward to getting to know members of the Sibelius community better. I hold a huge amount of respect for the Sibelius products, its development team, and the original Finn brother founders of Sibelius.
Here's a exchange of quotes from Daniel Spreadbury of Sibelius:
>> [From my (Mark's) blog post] What would you like to do musically, and how could computers make that easier?
> [From Daniel's blog] This gets right to the heart of what a product manager wants to know from the users (or potential users) of his product, and it’s always a great question to ask. At Sibelius I spend as much time as I can with individuals and groups of users, picking their brains to find out ways in which Sibelius could make their lives easier, or open up possibilities to them that they could previously only dream of. Mark’s post may well reach people who have a passing interest in music but who don’t even know that software exists out there to realise their creative dreams. I’ll certainly be watching the comments on his posts to see what ideas bubble up.
Peter, that you compose a lot in your head and enter it straight into Sibelius is a talent and skill envied by many, including myself. The music is somewhere there in my head, but not with the clarity that enables me to just write it straight down onto paper or into a music notation program. The music has first to go through my fingers, onto the piano or MIDI keyboard. I improvise it, taking many shots at a passage, until I'm fairly happy with it. In the old days, I would then hope that I could write down the notes on paper before I forgot them. Today, of course, I can just turn on the MIDI record button, and then see the notes up on the screen.
As much as my heart is into making software tools for musicians who compose and arrange music, if I could write music straight from my head to paper, I'd trade that talent and skill for Notation Composer which, in some sense, I developed to compensate for my less than ideal inner ear.
Thanks Mark,
I stumbled on this site through Daniel Spreadbury's Sibeliusblog - I didn't realise initially that it was for new composers.
Yes, I use Sibelius, but I compose a lot in my head and straight into Sibelius. Hardly ever use pencil and paper.
Some of the more complex stuff I'm trying to envisage still needs mocking up - and if I have to do that I might well use an audio editor like Audacity (with sound 'blocks' exported from Sibelius) or even, would you believe, the sound tracks in in iMovie! (they're easy to move around and piece together as you want) Then I have to figure a fake in Sibelius to get somewhere near what I'm hearing. I think it's important not to be limited by the features, or lack of them, in any particular notation application.
You're right, it's not everyday. But I live in hope!
Nice talking to you.
Having multiple instruments play in different meters at the same time is not a composition technique I'd recommend to the fairly new composers that this blog is intended for. That particular technique is a rare one, which would explain why the major notation programs don't readily support it. (That isn't to say that overlapping meters isn't a valid compositional technique.)
Peter, do you use one of the notation programs you mentioned during the activity of composing? Or, do you use them as desktop music publishing tools after you have composed the music and written it down on paper?
As a composer I've used Encore, Finale and, currently, my beloved Sibelius. What none of these programmes have done adequately is to enable me to compose a score that contains multiple simultaneous groups of instruments, each group with its own tempo/time signature and barring. This is hardly a new thing to want to do - look at Stockhausen's Gruppen, or way back to the beginning of the last century and Ives's Unanswered Question.
You can fake this in Sibelius, but you're fighting the software and it's cumbersome (tuplets, long bars, fake barlines) and if you don't like it, it's a lot of wasted time!
That's a good wishlist, which can be somewhat satisfied by tools already out there, but probably not as easily as you have suggested. We already have now at least three good topics for future blogs: (1) voice-to-MIDI, (2) virtual instruments, and (3) learning music notation.
I want to be able to record tones in my own voice and convert them to the sounds of a musical instrument and have control over the sounds using visible curves that I can pull and play with to make new fun noises! I'd also like the software to apply musical notes/symbols to the sounds so that it would help me learn to read musical notes and also I could print it out and give it to a real musician to play.