Saturday 4 October 2008

Musical scores II: Sideways music



I came up with this in the bath in my second year in Manchester. Everyone always used backwards guitar riffs to create a psychadelic feel, but why hadn't anyone tried making music moves sideways? 

I attempted to fix this by creating formulas to make sideways music versions of Bowie's 'Five Years' and The Stone Roses ' Waterfall'. Think there was one more, but I forget what it was. 'Waterfall' was the most successful, I basically took the length (in bars) of the song and used that to create octaves and I think the range of the notes in the song created the length in bars. Or something.

I had to use MIDI to play it, though now I think it would be served better by human error. It was played in a kind of chattering MIDI piano rumble and sounded really, really spooky. 

As was with much of  my Sideways music, my friends didn't seem to want to hear it. 

EDIT: You know what? I think the guitar part here is only one page of a six page score that stretched all the way down. Hmmm....

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