Patent Application
20130125732
Music Composition
It is common in music composition to transpose a musical composition from one key signature to another. This common transposition method makes a change to all the notes by shifting all notes in the composition from one key to another, yet keeping the relationship of all the notes relative to each other the same. This traditional method of transposition does not alter the melody at all, rather, it puts the same melody into another key signature. This patent application proposes a different set of rules for transposition, rules that produce new music and melodies that are pleasant to the ear.
1. Technical Problem
A great hindrance to a professional music composer is writer's block, and the inability to create melodic ideas that are unusual and counter intuitive to his or her style of composition. The great hindrance of any beginner composer is the lack of knowledge in the music arts, and lack of ability to comprehend and the complexities of creating sophisticated music that often requires years of experience and learning. Yet most people have the ability to judge and enjoy music. Thus, both the professional and the beginner song writer need a method or tool to generate unique music, and to simply use their listening skills to determine if a piece of generated music is useful for inclusion into their composition.
2. Solution to Problem
One solution to the problem of creating new ideas for music melodies is the subject of this application. Given any existing piece of music, represented in any form such as midi, musicxml, sound frequencies, etc, but most notably in the form of sheet music and musical scores, a method can be applied to the existing music to create an entirely new sound. Unlike the traditional transposition of music which shifts all notes from one key signature to another, this method transposes all the notes of an existing composition in a repeatable and consistent manner, but using a totally different set of transposition rules, herein this method is described as “X-Transposition”.
The music X-Transposing methods described herein may be carried out in any manner, either manually, on paper, with hardware, or with software. The result of X-Transposing an existing music composition using a combination of techniques claimed in this paper, often results in many unique new melodies that are pleasant to the ear. The process of X-Transposing music is quick using software. Once new music is generated using X-Transposing, playback of the music can reveal if the new music is pleasant or not. For example, if the new music is represented in the form of sheet music, playback of the generated output music using sheet-music-to-midi can be done using any off-the-shelf music composition software. Thus the analysis of whether a particular output of X-Transposition sounds good or not, can be done quickly and effectively. So when implemented with software, the music X-Transposition methods not only provide ideas for music melodies, but also does it quickly. The idea of X-Transposition leverages the fact that if a piece of existing music has structure and design that is effective, by simply changing the pitch of each note, the structure and design of the output music is also effective.
The main concept described in this application has to do with X-Transposing existing music. X-Transposing is the concept of creating new music or new music ideas by taking an existing piece of music, and replacing each of its individual notes (pitch) with a different note (pitch), whereby the rules for replacing notes is specified by a mapping-rule. The mapping-rule basically is a set of rules that maps any input note to a corresponding output note. The establishment of the mapping-rule is the first step needed in X-Transposition, either a static rule, called the Static Notes Mapping Table (the SNMT), or dynamic rules as discussed in one of the methods herein.
METHOD 1: One-Octave X-Transposition. At the core of the method to X-Transpose music is first, to make a one-to-one mapping of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale (the input notes) to 12 other notes (the output notes) which are also in the same set of notes from the chromatic scale. An example of a user-defined mapping-rule is shown in
Once an SNMT is obtained, the SNMT rules for conversion is applied on an existing piece of music. Each (Source) note of the existing music is converted into the corresponding Target note following the mapping-rules of a chosen SNMT. The music that results from the X-Transposition retains its structure, but the new composition's notes are of different pitch than the original composition.
The quality of the generated composition that results from performing the X-Transposition on an input music composition is highly dependent on which mapping-rule (SNMT) is used. The number of possible different SNMTs given that 12 input notes can map to any of the 12 output notes is 8,916,100,448,256 unique mapping-rules. It is discussed next that certain mapping-rules are more useful than others because some have a tendency to produce pleasant new melodies while others do not, while others produce output melodies that sound very similar to the original melody and thus are less useful.
METHOD 2: One-Octave X-Transposition With Adherence to the Scale Degrees of a Key Signature (Major-Scale-Degree mapping-rules for a key signature). As noted earlier, given there are 12 different input notes that may be mapped to 12 different output notes, the number of possible SNMT mapping-rules are huge (8,916,100,448,256). Therefore, focus of this technique is on those SNMT mapping-rules that map a major key's 7 scale-degrees to each other. Each of the major key signatures has 7 scale-degree notes that comprise the key's major scale, and 5 non-scale-degree notes. An additional mapping criteria of this technique is that no two Source notes in a mapping-rule can map to the same Target note. The SNMT mapping of scale-degree to scale-degree tends to produce useful and pleasant new sounds. This concept applies to any of the major key signatures, but the example here focuses on the C-major key signature. An example of these mappings is shown in
As such, the total number of these mapping-rules is 5,040 which are named the Major-Scale-Degree mapping-rules for a given key signature, and they form a unique subset of the 8,916,100,448,256 possible mapping-rules, and can uniquely be named as MSD-1 through MSD-5040 for that key signature. The algorithm below called EnumerateTheMSD_SNMT_mapping_rules_for_the_key_of_C( ), when executed, assigns the names of these 5,040 Major-Scale-Degree mapping-rules for the key of C. The assignment of names to 5,040 Major-Scale-Degree mapping-rules for the other key signatures can be done by simply changing the ‘C’ in the algorithm below with the Tonic note of the desired key signature, the ‘D’ with the with Supertonic, the ‘E’ with the Mediant, the ‘F’ with the Subdominant, the ‘G’ with the Dominant, the ‘A’ with the Submediant, and the ‘B’ with the Leading Note. For these 5,040 mapping-rules, the 5 non-major-scale degree input notes of these mapping-rules map to themselves, but alternately can map into any of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, forming variants of the 5,040 Major-Scale-Degree mapping-rules.
METHOD 3: Full-Range X-Transposition. Another method to X-transpose an existing composition is to use a mapping-rule that covers the entire range of notes possible for the musical instrument. For example, for a piano, the mapping-rule can map all 88 steps/notes on the music scale to 88 other steps/notes, thus creating a more firm mapping and a different result than an X-Transposition using method 1. When the Full-Range X-Transposition is applied to an existing composition, the notes of the original composition are swapped on a one-for-one basis as specified by the Full-Range mapping-rule mappings. A software implementation of this method would allow the user to specify or configure the Full-Range mapping-rule used for X-transposition.
METHOD 4: Dynamic X-Transposition. Another method of X-Transposing is to not apply a static mapping (such as an SNMT) to an entire composition, but allow for different rules to be applied to each note. One such method would be to adjust a note up or down by one or more major scale degrees depending on certain parameters, one of which could be the distance in half-steps between the current note under processing and the previous note.
METHOD 5: Reversing music and representing it in sheet music or score. Given a piece of music, whether is is in the form of sheet music or live music, discriminate each individual note and produce a reverse of that music in the form of sheet music. The length and tone of each note is preserved. If ties are present in the sheet music, they would also be present in the reversal of the sheet music. Everything else stays the same including time signature, clef, etc.
Examples are embedded in the description above
Concepts may be used in the music composition industry.
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