futurehead

Mess of the week #3: Opus 8 fugue

Here's a litle piece I made many, many years ago on an original McIntosh computer.  When I wrote it I optimized it for the computer tones that the Mac emitted, and I've tried a bunch of instruments but can't quite seem to get the orchestration right to recapture the original clarity of the voices I remember.  So, throwing in the towel, here it is with a very tinny, primitive synthesizer sound that harkens back at least a little to that original sound.

When I wrote this I was (as I still am) primarily fascinated by polyphony and Bach and I was playing around with fugues and multiple voices.

 Download jay_stanley_opus8fugue.mp3 (1.3 megs, 45 seconds, 256 kbits)

Mess of the week #2

Here's this week's musical mess:

 Download jay_stanley_all_wet.mp3 (408k, 26 seconds, 128 kbits)

This one's a herky-jerky piano with imitative trumpet & strings on top.

Mess of the week #1

I'm no musician but I do like to mess around with music.  I never had music lessons as a child, and I can't really read music, but ever since college I've enjoyed noodling around from time to time with music on keyboards and computers.

I currently have a Yamaha YPT-300 keyboard (which I'm very impressed with and which I highly recommend to any other musical dilettantes out there) and use the free Anvil Studio sequencing software.

Once a week I will post a new original musical "mess" I've composed (though you will doubtless find that's too grand a word).  They tend to be very short - perfect musical blog entries.  Here's one to start off with:

Download jay_stanley_musicbox.mp3 (704k, 45 seconds, 128 kbit)

These are in MIDI format, and should play on any music player like Winamp - though they may sound better or worse depending on the quality of your soundcard and its MIDI abilities. (I just clicked it here and it came up in Quicktime and sounded pretty awful – or at least awful in a different way than I intended.  Maybe I'll have to post as an MP3 so I can control how it sounds...)

Update: I changed the file to an MP3 because it just sounded too terrible on several computers I tried it on.