Adventures in Atonality

Well, the chord progression for assignment 1 is complete, and been performed in class. At first, I wasn't quite sure how to go about writing this, but the usual method of experimentation and incremental refinement worked well enough.

I sat down in front of Sonar and recorded a whole pile of random chords. Sometimes, if I liked one, or almost liked one, I'd try moving a couple of the notes a few semitones one way or the the other, but mostly I just left them as-is, with little thought for flow or progression. After I had a bunch of them, I went and listened to the recording a couple times, and copied those chords which appealed to me for one reason or another. I think I was left with about 25 or so at this point.

Next, I tried to order the chords both according to rising and falling tension levels, as well as what felt like a fairly natural harmonic progression. Many chords were used as-is, but at a few points, I could feel the harmony wanting to move in a certain way, and created a new, related chord to follow an existing one.

I was fairly pleased with it by this point, although I was a bit concerned that the tension level didn't drop off enough by the end. Many of the songs in class ended in a high register, and that was my original plan, as well. It's generally easier for high register chords to sound less tense (although, inversely, when notes in the upper register clash against each other, it can be much more shrill and piercing). However, my final chords were among my lowest. Since I generally liked how it went, I tried thinning out the final chords instead of writing new ones, deleting a few of the more dissonant notes.

Evidently I may not have done enough, since several people thought that the end was nearly as tense as the climax, and at least one thought it was the most tense of all. Part of the problem, in this case, I believe, is that the instrument I wrote this on is much less rumbly in the lower register than the grand piano in class. The final chord is actually fairly clean, since the notes are spread out over 3 octaves, but it also starts at C2.

Actually, I found it interesting how the relative tension levels of the chords (both for my composition, and others) seem to be fairly subjective. A friend that I had played it for before class actually thought that chord 4 was the most tense, nearly the opposite of the feedback I got in class. I find that the type of tension one gets from low and high register chords has quite a different tone, and I wonder if one type or the other sounds more tense to different people. Chord 4 is still in the upper register

I've also noticed when I've been rating the tension of other people's chords that my subjective impression of the absolute tension of a chord has a lot to do with the tension of the preceding chord. Even if two chords are probably equally tense, the second often sounds softer to me, since the previous one has already sort of 'prepared' me, in a sense. I've noticed a number of songs where the first chord sounds more tense than the next few following ones, and think this is just because the contrast between silence and dissonance is so much greater than dissonance and slightly more dissonance.

On a separate note, I'm looking into embedding some audio files into this blog, that I could use to demonstrate snippets of the songs that I'm working on for the course. I'll post more when I've gotten that working.