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Algorithmic 

Music Composition

R & D

Creating a musical composition is a function of three primary generative factors: Tuning, Tonality, and Timing. Tuning is the division of the audible frequency continuum into a set of discrete values, i.e., Notes. Tonality is a set of Notes from which a Note Sequence is derived. Timing is the application of start, duration and interval temporal values applied to a Note Sequence.

Sometime in midsummer of mid-1970s my close friend Willaim D’Agostino and I spent the early hours of a hot afternoon at the Osborne Nature Sanctuary in Rye, New York. As was our custom, we returned to Bill’s place and struck up a jam session. I had been fooling around on my guitar with a C-F#-C-F# linear finger pattern on the E through G strings. As I played the note sequence, I reversed the linear fingering to the notes C-E-A-C#. Then alternated each pattern… and it became obvious - rather than the guitar string tuning of E-A-D-G-B-E why not other notes? and why limit this to 6 strings? Why not change the string intervals to other patterns and expand both the vertical and horizontal dimensions… It was at that precise moment that the concept of a Tonality Plane and the extraction of a Note Sequence was conceived.​

Naturally, Bill and I discussed the idea, and as often happens with recollection of events that have occurred decades earlier, what happened next is a bit hazy. We worked together to produce some rudimentary compositions. Mr. D’Agostino was particularly enthused and authored a treatise in 1978, The Matrix Music System, detailing his investigations, to which I contributed Tonality Plane graphs.

The resemblance to the 12-tone method developed by Schoenberg, who completed his first fully serial works circa. 1921-1923, Serenade and Suite for Piano, op. 25, was immediately obvious. As an act of homage to my conceptual forebearer, I added a tone row over the alternating linear note sequence, and  passages based on a variation of a different tonality plane was inserted, to produce a full-fledged, although experimental, simple composition THC/LSD (i.e., "THC over LSD") You can hear the composition, also known as “Tone Row over Tonality Plane,” in its entirety on my YouTube Channel.

​With the commercial release of Commodore computers, we independently began to develop software that embodied the Matrix Music system algorithms, until in the early 1980s, we joined forces. Shortly after the release of an IBM DOS version in the early 1990s, we ended our creative and business collaboration. Mr. D’Agostino returned to music composition using the system in the late 2010s His work can be heard on YouTube at  and many other music streaming services.

 

Rather than characterize the music produced by using this system as experimental, and to differentiate it from the myriad applications of the term "algorithmic" or "generative" and poor excuses of calling "noise" music, my preferred description of the genre is Musical Composition Methodology Research and Development; my overarching effort: Creative Theoretical Investigation.

Entrance to the Osborne Nature Sanctuary and my Mosrite Guitar
(circa 1975)

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