What Sheep Herd (Why Don't You Write Me?)

Programmed by Nick Didkovsky in JSyn and JMSL



Introduction

This piece was developed after Phil Kline invited me to create a piece for an evening of music he curated. Comprised of pieces based on pop music, the event was called "Your Hit Parade" and took place at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 583 Broadway, NY NY, on Sunday March 26 at 3 pm. I chose Paul Simon's Why Don't You Write Me? as the source material for my piece.

This piece premiered on Saturday, Feb 26, 2000, at the Warwick Cyber Arts Festival, and was performed there by Nick Didkovsky (computer) and Barbara Benary (Erh Hu). The piece was performed again at "Your Hit Parade" (see above), by James Forrest and Joel Mellin on computers, and Barbara Benary (Erh Hu).
 

Description

"What Sheep Herd" provides you with up to 8 voices of independently looping melody. The first 17 notes of "Why Don't You Write Me" are available to each voice, and they all start by repeating the first note of the melody very slowly.

The user can:

This compact set of choices is rich enough, in my view, to provide you with an instrument that takes practice... you get better after playing with it and figuring out various tricks.

As usual, this is in Gamelan Son Of Lion tuning.
 

Play

You will need:


Perform What Sheep Herd (why Don't You Write Me?) (CD quality audio).

Contact

Nick Didkovsky: Nick.Didkovsky@mail.rockefeller.edu

 

JMSL and JSyn

JSyn is Phil Burk's realtime music synthesis language. JMSL is an experimental music programming language by Nick Didkovsky and Phil Burk, which is based on HMSL. Both JSyn and JMSL are written in Java, which allows for pieces to be presented on the Web.
For JSyn info, please visit www.softsynth.com
For JMSL info, please visit www.algomusic.com

Thanks

Thanks to Phil Burk for JSyn, to Phil Kline, and Barbara Benary, Joel Mellin, and Jamie Forrest.

More Radical Online Music!