Title : Part Two Of Nostalgia Meets Modern Technology - Guest Post By Dr. Andrew May...
link : Part Two Of Nostalgia Meets Modern Technology - Guest Post By Dr. Andrew May...
Part Two Of Nostalgia Meets Modern Technology - Guest Post By Dr. Andrew May...
 |
| Copyright MARVEL COMICS |
In a previous guest post on Kid's blog, I talked about some of the positive benefits that modern digital technology can offer, even for old-timers like myself who spend a lot of time mentally living in the past. In particular, I love the way that, now I've got more time on my hands, it lets me engage in creative activities that I've always had a hankering to do, but lack any natural talent for. During a recent side discussion with Kid, I remembered two other examples of this from a few years ago that may be worth mentioning. The first concerns the Avengers issue pictured above, which was one of the first Marvel comics I ever bought, while the second relates to Fireball XL5, which was the first sci-fi TV show I ever watched. If that isn't nostalgia, I don't know what is!
Another advantage of no longer having a day job is that I have time to write books on various subjects, and back in 2019 I did one called The Science of Sci-Fi Music. One chapter of this deals with the 12-tone method of writing music, which as well as featuring in the soundtracks of movies like Planet of the Apes and Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (not to mention various Tom and Jerry cartoons) was also used by Frank Zappa in a couple of his songs. When I discovered this, I vaguely recollected seeing an ad for one of Zappa's albums in a comic-book I read as a child. I eventually tracked this down to Avengers #50 as pictured above (though I imagine it appeared in other comics around the same time), and the album in question turned out to be "We're Only in It for the Money" by The Mothers of Invention.
Having dug the comic out, I decided to do a short video of me flicking through it, complete with a specially written soundtrack courtesy of modern technology. I scoured the internet for MIDI clips of various songs from the album (four of them: "Who Needs the Peace Corps?", "Let's Make the Water Turn Black", "The Idiot Bastard Son" and "Mother People"), imported these into a music-editing program, made various adjustments to make them fit together in a reasonably harmonious fashion, and then changed the instrumentation from a rock band to a full concert orchestra. Here's the result:
Another chapter of my sci-fi music book deals with "algorithmic composition" - in other words, programming a computer to write music - and this led to another nostalgia-laden experiment. One musical form that particularly lends itself to algorithmic composition, because its rules are so prescriptive and mathematical, is the fugue. This hasn't had any great popularity since the early 1700s (because even when written by a human it tends to sound like it was cranked out by a machine), but I thought I'd have a go at a computer-generated fugue anyway.
The only real input the program needs is a starting melody, so for fun I chose one of my favourite tunes from my childhood, "I Wish I Was a Spaceman" (sung by Don Spencer) from the Fireball XL5 end-titles. The program itself was constructed using OpenMusic, a free app that's specifically designed for algorithmic composition. You can see it in the background to the video which follows - the "Fireball" input tune is up in the top left-hand corner, while the other inputs along the top row are lists of acceptable rhythmic units and chord progressions. Everything below that was generated by the computer itself, and (to my ears, at least) the end result does sound like a pretty convincing little fugue!
When I originally posted this on Facebook in 2019, I invited suggestions for other tunes I could plug into the program, but I didn't get any takers. I'll make the same offer now, although I can't promise I can still get the program to work! In fact I love these "X in the style of Y" experiments (I've also done rock and electronic versions of classical tunes, as well as orchestrations of pop songs as in the Zappa example). So requests are always welcome!
Thus Article Part Two Of Nostalgia Meets Modern Technology - Guest Post By Dr. Andrew May...
You are now reading the article Part Two Of Nostalgia Meets Modern Technology - Guest Post By Dr. Andrew May... the link address https://tellingguidefor.blogspot.com/2024/03/part-two-of-nostalgia-meets-modern.html
0 Response to "Part Two Of Nostalgia Meets Modern Technology - Guest Post By Dr. Andrew May..."
Post a Comment