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Originally Posted by thorkil2
This is just another excursion into serialism.
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I can understand why it would superficially appear as 'just serialism' but this is a misunderstanding. The
serialism wiki page states that serialism
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is often broadly applied to all music written in what Arnold Schoenberg called "The Method of Composing with Twelve Notes related only to one another" or dodecaphony, and methods which evolved from his methods... The vocabulary of serialism is rooted in set theory, and uses a quasi-mathematical language to describe how the basic sets are manipulated to produce the final result. Musical set theory is often used to analyze and compose serial music, but may also be used to study tonal music and nonserial atonal music. The basis for serial composition is Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, where the 12 notes of the basic chromatic scale are organized into a row. This "basic" row is then used to create permutations, that is, rows derived from the basic set by reordering its elements.
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My method shares the absence of conventional melody and the equal use of all notes in the scale, but it does not repeat sets, and its structure is externally given by the planets, so it lacks a key serialist dimension in that the notes are not 'related only to one another' but are related only to the planetary positions. The wiki quotes serialist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen:
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Serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever: it's relativity and nothing else. It just says: Use all the components of any given number of elements, don't leave out individual elements, use them all with equal importance and try to find an equidistant scale so that certain steps are no larger than others. It's a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world. The stars are organized in a serial way. Whenever you look at a certain star sign you find a limited number of elements with different intervals. If we more thoroughly studied the distances and proportions of the stars we'd probably find certain relationships of multiples based on some logarithmic scale or whatever the scale may be. (Cott 1973, 101)
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I don't know if anyone has taken Stockhausen up on this suggestion of finding serial patterns in constellations, but that is a very different project from my effort to depict the dynamics of the solar system.
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Originally Posted by thorkil2
It may carry information about harmonic relationships (strictly in the musical sense), but will offer no recoverable information about the solar system to the listener. The tonal assignments are "designed" but ultimately arbitrary, since they can be designed according to whatever pattern the composer decides to rationalize. In fact, it offers no way of perceiving our cosmic neighborhood in any direct experiential sense (because the listener has no way of decoding all the information), but if you combined it with a pitch-keyed decoding system that translated the sound into graphic models as it played, you might have something interesting in multimedia.
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It is frustrating that I do not have the resources to put the theory into practice, except at the rudimentary level outlined in the OP. Putting the long term Earth-Venus and Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune cycles into this method will most definitely provide recoverable information about the solar system. By programming volumes so that planetary conjunctions are loud, the Earth Venus composition will produce a five note pattern reflecting the 8:13 E:V relation every eight years, which will very slowly precess according to the model
here. Similarly, the 5:9:14 JSN patterns will produce overlapping ascending semitone compositions which directly correlate to the major long term structure of the gas giant orbits which produces the basic pattern of the solar system barycentre shown
here. These are far from arbitrary. It is not about 'rationalizing' but choosing a time period, empirical inputs and parameters with which to depict them.