Polyhedral dice for musicians
Musicians who play tabletop RPGs, rejoice -- here's a detailed guide to using polyhedral dice to improve your musical skills.
Link (Thanks, Amy!)The d12 is Schoenberg’s dream die. Music majors, rejoice! Now the dice gods can determine your tone row for you.
The d12 is also excellent for all you wind players who have to do scale competencies in order to pass band. Pair it with the d4 for maximum torture… I mean, practice value.
1. C
2. C#/Db
3. D
4. D#/Eb
5. E
6. F
7. F#/Gb
8. G
9. G#/Ab
10. A
11. A#/Bb
12. BRoll for your key!
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As if bards wasn't annoying enough :P
d12 for 12-tone music? How 1980's. If you really want to be out there, create a d43 to play some of Harry Partch's works.
There was nothing cool about the serialists, please don't bring them back.
Music + Dice = Fail
Major problem here- serialists were anything BUT aleatory musicians. It's John Cage's dream die.
I wouldn't have put it past Harry Partch to make an instrument out of d12s. But surely you're well off by a couple of decades whether your talking about him or Schoenberg, who is another example of something I should like but cant possibly get my head round. I mean if you read Adorno or Thomas Mann its like 12 tone 4 eva, but when you listen to it, you sort of just want to destroy the stereo. At least Stravinsky had a sense of humour, even if he was a music whore.
There's serial music & serial music. Schoenberg's music (sometimes) had humor - take the send up of Stravinsky in his Variations op31. Berg's violin concerto is achingly beautiful. And Milton Babbitt's music, is, um...
I think bagging all serial music is like saying all rap music is just noise with people speaking over it.
The studio notes duplicated in "More Dark Than Shark" list backgammon dice as essential to Brian Eno's early studio hardware; being based on powers of two, they're a great way for relatively conventional composers to decide how many times to repeat something. This goes back at least to Mozart, though, who famously had a dice game for composition - google "aleatoric music" and you get the whole history of chance-based (more often than not, dice-based) music on up from Mozart to John Cage and, more recently, the generative music of Koan (championed by Eno, no surprise there, and later shrunk down by Thomas Dolby's Beatnik system), and other software packages that do for aleatoric music what Neverwinter Nights did for dice-based RPGs.
This sort of thing works great for techno, especially if a DJ's ultimately gonna decide when and how your composition begins and ends, but it doesn't generate much emotion or plot...luckily Homo sapiens are already MUCH too good at projecting their own ideas of emotion and plot on any random data they're presented, giving us the concept of stochasticism.
Oooh, I actually did use my 12-sided dice to create (awful) tone rows, though it was kind of a pain rerolling after I kept getting the same numbers. A much better use was when I wass doing random chord change charts that I was taught to use to learn how to transition through difficult chord changes in jazz songs.
Use the same 12-key chart above for the root of the chord, and then this one for the chord type:
6-sided die:
1 - Major 7th
2 - Minor 7th
3-5 - Dominant 7th
6 - see chart #2:
Chart number 2 involved things like rerolling above, but using a 4-sided die to choose the upper partial (7th, 9th, 11th, 13th) and there are other chords types to mix in. Best way to make a page of absolutely random chord changes. Good way to get at sight-reading changes, but not so good for learning to hear conventional changes in most jazz songs.
Gotta agree, not all serial music is the same. I fancy Webern's and Stravinsky's, but never got into Schoenberg's or Berg's much, and as for Babbitt, well...
There's a great story I remember hearing about Steve Reich as a composition student, writing these repeating tone rows until his professor said, "If you want to write tonal music, write tonal music." Ah yes, it was Berio.
As a compositional tool, you'd do much better with a midi sequencer with a "random" function. Vastly faster, and about equal geek cred.
As a practice tool... well why not just do your scales chromatically or on the circle of fifths? At least that way you know you got to them all. Eb is a hard key for me, and I'm liable to luck out and never roll it, and so never practice it.
My music theory teacher used a 12-sided die for our ear-training classes to randomly determine what intervals he should play. He originally used to use two six-sided dice, but a classmate of mine pointed out that he would be weighting himself too heavily around perfect fifths.
didn't I just read here recently that we are all born with perfect pitch?
Taku-san, could you reference me to this 'perfect pitch' lie? I disbelieve. (And Google has failed me.)
I'll look. It was mentioned here a moment or decade ago...
there, young Podkayne:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2001/san_francisco/1179664.stm
TheGiantSnail 4: I was about to say that, but you beat me to it. Constructing a good tone row is WORK. And, in my own opinion, it's the mountains in labor to bring forth a mouse.
ScottFree 5: Come now, Partch's music may not be to your taste, but it's anything but random. And the 42-tone octaves are only for fixed-pitch instruments, because he used microtones; no one piece uses all 42, like some kind of serial music with a thyroid condition. His tunings were subtle, so the handmade fixed-pitch instruments had to have lots of options.
Emic 6: I used to like Luigi Dallapiccola quite a lot (but couldn't listen to it any more after years of Reich and Reilly and Glass and Adams). And Milton Babbit's work is like music in that it's written on a page with notes and staves and dynamics, and played by people who also work as musicians, but there the resemblance ends. Serializing all aspects of a composition doesn't give you music, it gives you cacophony. Babbit proved that, but that doesn't make the result worth listening to.
Tenn 12 (Fourteenn 16?), I'd be curious too. What I have heard is that more of us have the potential for perfect pitch than had previously been thought. Did you know that over 80% of native speakers of Chinese (a tone language) have perfect pitch? I'd like to see what happens when a child of European descent is raised speaking Chinese, but I doubt there are enough of those cases for a meaningful study—and a study which would only serve to disprove what I personally believe, which is that nearly everyone could have excellent (if not perfect) pitch if they were taught properly.
Takuan 14 (after writing the above and refreshing): That's absolutely fascinating. And it supports my theory.
I now have a stronger case of Orientenvy than I did a moment ago. My parents raised me telling me I couldn't sing or tell notes- I used to half-blame them for my utter lack of ability, but since they started before I was a toddler, I now blame them fully and seriously. Sheesh.
Wow, Tenn, that borders on abuse. "You can't sing" has to be the most common lie people tell children, and one of the most damaging.
you can still do it. It's just work.
The perfect pitch bit is quite interesting. Both myself and my mum before me learned to play classical music from a young age, and we joke about being practically tone deaf. I have a pretty good ear for the relation between notes, but have no sense of absolute value whatsoever. So once I know the key, I can transcribe something pretty well, but until then, I randomly play along, hoping to stumble onto the correct scale. Alternatively, a friend of mine has perfect pitch despite not only a complete ignorance of music, but really horrible taste as well.
There is a stack of classical lps in the corner of my bedroom I salvaged from a friend, and among them is a harry partch album I haven't got round to listening to yet. Maybe its time to learn some new theory.
What a great idea... but how many scales do you have to play before you level up?
Also, @ 4 + 5 about this whole aleatoric, 12-tone thing: I actually bought a d12 when I was taking some composition classes with some composers of the atonal variety, thinking they'd never notice the difference if I slipped in a randomly-generated note or two. During one class the prof pointed at the one note I wrote on a dice roll and said, "This note makes absolutely no sense." Make of that what you will, but a d12 is definitely NOT Schoenberg's dream die.
Tenn-chan; try
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFWYSW4vfcA&feature=related
there is lots on the web for how-to, also try to watch Genghis Blues
Just thought of this: Babbit's music: Dodecacophony.
how do you feel about
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QH2xGuftkE
Headline makes me think there is special kind of d-12 for musicians.
Is that Leger, as in the artist? Visually very interesting: the juxtaposition of woman and industry seems to make a statement about production.
Musically, wtf? It strikes me as extremely excessive, and fair enough maybe excess is the expression of industrial culture, but why would I want to listen to/be confronted by it?
Alright, maybe I'm starting to understand this whole serialist bit: its similar to analytic cubism, in that analytic cubism discovered new forms of representation, while serialism discovered new forms of...new points of reference? Looking at what was lost in traditional musical structures? I understand one of the points of Schoenberg--a la Adorno, 'he predicted the sorrows of the holocaust through music'--is that it isn't particularly pleasant to be confronted by modernity. Still, I don't really want to listen to too much of it at this point in my life.
"The original orchestration called for 16 player pianos (pianolas) in four parts, 2 regular pianos, 3 xylophones, 7 electric bells, 3 propellers, siren, 4 bass drums, and 1 tam-tam. As it turned out, there was no way to keep so many pianolas synchronized, so early performances used a re-orchestration with 1 pianola and 10 pianos.
In 1953, Antheil wrote a shortened version for four pianos, four xylophones, two electric bells, two propellers, timpani, glockenspiel, and other percussion. The original orchestration was first realized in 1999, when the University of Massachusetts, Lowell Percussion Ensemble performed it using MIDI-controlled Disklaviers.[1]"
Takuan 23: It's clearly better than Babbit. Fairly horrendous, but at least it has patterns.
Steven Mithern suggests the possibility of everyone having perfect pitch in the singing neanderthal, and suggests we lose it in order to develop a kind of relative pitch that lests us recognise inflections in speech.
http://media.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/dn13672A1.wav
When I was in high school and we had to write group compositions for Music (my very least fav. part of the subject) we had a similar system. It worked like this:
Step 1: Pick a number between 1-7 (we would randomise it so that 1 wasn't always C, so you couldn't cheat). This determined the key.
Step 2: Flip Heads or Tails to determine major or minor key.
Step 3: Assign a number value to each of the notes in the randomly chosen scale. (ie. for C Major C=1, D=2, E=3, etc...)
Step 4: Grab the local phone book, pick a number at random and play that number.
All that was left was to tinker with the tempo, and embellish the original riff a bit, so that it sounded tolerable. But essentially it gave you Composition in a Can!
If you used dice instead you wouldn't have to rely on a friend to help randomise Step 1. There's hope for the lazy, nigel-no-friends among us yet!
It's possible for many people to learn absolute ("perfect") pitch, even if they don't start out with it. In particular, if you have relative pitch (which most musicians have or develop) and have memorized at least one reference tone (which many folks also have acquired one way or another), you can combine those two skills to figure out the pitch for any given note.
I recall hearing about some studies where a reasonably high percentage of musicians were able to recognize and produce on command particular named notes after a couple of weeks of training.
Now, there are folks who *intuitively* pick out or reproduce named notes without (consciously?) doing any relative-reference calculation. That's rarer, and appears to usually require picking up the ability young, or doing *lots* of training. (I've never felt a need to train for that, so I don't know exactly how hard it is to acquire, but I can do absolute pitch with some thought via reference tones.)
If you're used to hearing orchestras tuning up, or use a standard tuning fork, you probably know from memory, pretty precisely, the A used there (440 Hz). That's a reference pitch lots of musicians have. Many singers also know the sound and the note values of the usual breaks or range-limits in their voices; I suspect that many instrumentalists also have an intuitive memory of significant notes on their instruments.
And many non-musicians also intuitively, if unconsciously, recognize the pitch of an electric hum, which in the US tends to be an A-sharp (60Hz, the frequency of AC power in this country.) So if you're at home with no other references, you can usually tune off your refrigerator if you need to.
my guitarist friend would come up with chords from looking at number plates
say the number plate was 982
he wouldplay the 9th fret then 8th then 2nd
he came up with some cool stuff like that
It bothers me that the source site makes its money by selling internet dating profile consultation. Especially as the prices are par for a massage parlor 'dating' service.
Could there be a more manipulative way to take advantage of people with autism spectrum disorders than by advertising oneself as a 'geek-girl' who'll do phone-consultations about dating for 50$ a pop?
I'm no prude, but that's exploitation.
Neat. This reminds me of a Qbasic program I wrote that took a progression of scales the user wanted, and then played random notes in the scale in jazz time. It didn't sound great (Maybe If I used midi instead of the terrible sound card notes) nut the notes sounded like they go together.
#9 Ratbastid,
Well, if you only practice your scales/arpeggios chromatically, you only get really good at chromatic progressions. Same with circle of fifths stuff. The idea was to get good at finding possible transitions from any chord to any other chord. Kind of "iron man" stuff for jazz improvisation.
(But it surely didn't train me in working through more standard harmonies; to get good at Rhythm Changes, you need to practice Rhythm Changes, which I soon discovered after practicing absolutely random chord progressions this way. I never threw out the routine completely, but it's a pretty out-there skill, not in the range you'd necessarily use very often unless you're playing some pretty "out" stuff...)
Hey all. This has been made into a real product. With notes instead of numbers.
www.rollplaydice.com
enjoy!
As a musician myself, this seems pretty cool.
Great post!
I love it...especially as an affordable gift option for the impossible-to-buy-for musical teenagers...something interesting to give something other than CDs or gift cards! Great post, thanks!