Tag Archives: Christmas

Out in the Cold

[play]Out in the Cold

I kind of hope this is the last year I ever have to hear ‘Baby it’s Cold Outside’ as anything other than a bad example.

It comes from a romantic comedy from the 1940s, as a sound track to a scene in which the female lead is trying desperately to escape a Pepe le Pew-like character. This then cuts to an inversion of the scene where a foreign man is trying to escape a woman. That inversion is played with physical comedy.

This song has been covered countless times, but the only versions I could find with the aggressive-woman variation were two sketches starring Miss Piggy.

This cut up uses one line from the film version, plus a few measures of bridge section from that recording.

All of my Christmas songs this year are to fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.

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Met Office Forecast

[play]Met Office Forecast

There are two versions of Bing Crosby singing ‘white Christmas’ on YouTube. One is an older recording, full of hiss and pops and the other is the official version put up by his record company. The official version is much shorter and, despite being remastered, is a lower-effort production.

This is a remix of both versions. The vevo recording has been run through Paulstretch. The older version I manually cut up into 1 or 2 bar phrases. I wrote a SuperCollider script to loop the phrases, cut them up and navigate through them. This is all of that mixed together, plus one word from the song.

The song was originally about nostalgia and climate change – he used to know Christmases with snow. Now the song itself is laden with a nostalgia and wording that has been troubling co-oped. I think it’s important to keep the climate aspects central to the song’s ongoing meaning

All of my Christmas songs this year are to fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.

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Have Yourself a Scary Christmas

[play]Have yourself a Scary Christmas

Once again this year, I’m doing a series of Christmas music where every piece is written within a few hours. All of the pieces this year will be at least loosely based on the Vaporwave genre. Today’s song is a remix of Judy Garland singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’

She sounded like she was already a bit merry to me on the recording, but then I ran it through Paulstretch and expanded it by 8 times the duration and it became suddenly clear that this song is actually made up entirely of existential anguish. This remix uses an 8x stretch, a 30x stretch and a little bit of normal speed, all assembled in SuperCollider.

This year, I am fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.

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Auld Lag Sine

[play] Auld Lag Sine (2016)

If you enjoyed this piece of music, please consider donating to the Hackney Night Shelter. This shelter takes no government funding and thus is able to provide shelter to people ineligible for government benefits, including refugees and asylum seekers who do not have the correct status to receive taxpayer funded aid. It is one of few secular organisations in this funding situation. This is especially helpful for asylum seekers that feel uncomfortable with religious organisation (especially those fleeing religiously-motivated violence, such as members of minority religions or LGBT people).

My friend Dan, who volunteers with the Night Shelter suggested last night that I do a version of Auld Lang Syne. Our attempts to sing it at a party were, as always, somewhat shambolic. For this version, I thought of the puns before I started working on the music, but this is an attempt to create the idea of drunken, sentimental sine waves toasting the new year.

Each voice is three sine waves, all up to an 8th tone out of tune, which have some portamento from one note to the next. The target pitch in the slide gets closer to the correct pitch as each note goes on. The highest sine wave pauses between notes, but the lower ones carry on. The piece starts with some short bursts of Markov chains as the voices try to agree on the notes and where they are in the song. Eventually, they go through the whole song, each varying tempo as they go, falling behind or catching up with the others. Finally, they all end together.

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which solicits funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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Wacky Kings

[play] Wacky Kings (2015)

If you enjoyed this piece of music, please consider donating to Mermaids. Mermaids is an organisation that provides support to trans children and their families.

The sound generation is based on a synthdef by Rukano (which is based on a meme, which is based on Eurovision). I modified sound to use slightly different envelopes for every partial, to sharpen the attack and to have the sound gradually decrease in amplitude over time. From the sound, I generated a dissonance curve and from that, generated a 12-tone just scale.

For the melody, I generated Markov chains from a MIDI version of We Three Kings. I slowed the result down, added legato and mapped it to my derived scale. The overlapping tails of notes ends up obscuring the brass sound and makes it sound more like a pipe organ or bells.

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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The Figgy Pudding Incident

[play]The Figgy Pudding Incident (2015)

If you enjoyed this piece of music, please consider donating to the Albert Kennedy Trust, who work with homeless LGBT young people.

A couple of days ago, my wife made me aware of the second and third verses of ‘We Wish you a Merry Christmas’, in which the singers demand ‘So bring us a figgy pudding and bring it out here.’ Followed by ‘We won’t go until we’ve got some, so bring it out here!’

This was my favorite carol when I was very young, as there seemed to be no constraints on how loudly we were allowed to shout/sing. With the lyrics in mind, it’s clear this is because it’s a song about mob rule and the medieval version of Christmas, where many social rules were temporarily suspended.

The sound is Karplus Strong and the melody is a slightly mis-typed version of We Wish you a Merry Christmas, looping, gradually increasing in length and then variations.

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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Ask Not for Whom the Bell Carols

[play] Ask Not for Whom the Bell Carols (2015)

If you enjoyed this piece of music, please consider donating to the Albert Kennedy Trust, who work with homeless LGBT young people.

For this piece, I used Risset bells with a long decay. I used a Dissonance-curve style analysis of the partials to generate a tuning based on the timbre. Rather than use the method outlined by Bill Sethares, I compared the partials to look for good just tuning ratios. I then picked the 8 most in-tune partials (using a moving window system, so make sure they weren’t all next to each other). This is part of my TuningLib quark, which is available to SuperCollider users. (See the justScale method for DissonanceCurve)

Then I used an mp3 of the Bell Carol, but very slowly. I also adjusted the tuning of every partial by up to 10Hz and delayed all attacks by up to 60 milliseconds. This creates weird beating effects, as two identical bells are just slightly out of tune with each other. Their attacks are also often just a bit too far apart to be simultaneous.

I have ambitions to generalise harmony in terms of dissonance, so that it’s applicable to bespoke tuning systems, but ended up not applying that to this piece. This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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Away in a Manger

[play]Away in a Manger (2004)

If you like this piece, please consider donating to Shelter, a charity that deals with homelessness in the UK.

In 2004, back when I was doing my MA, I had just devised algorithms for automated cutting for Text Sound Poetry. I was mostly using these on political pundits, but when the holidays came around, I thought I could have my mac’s internal voice read some hymn lyrics and then do some cutting. The computer brightly proclaimed, ‘I love you, Lord Jesus!’ and I felt giddy with horror.

My partner at the time listened to it and said it was too cynical. So it sad on a hard drive for these last 11 years. It probably is too cynical for Christmas, but it’s not altogether out of place for this project.

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:59 — 4.1MB)

Angel Invaders

[play]Angel Invaders (2015)

If you enjoyed this track (or not), please consider donating to the LGBT Foundation. I first became aware of this foundation because they are fighting laws which criminalize relationships. In the UK, it is legal to lie about one’s marital status, age, religion or whether one has had an STI test, yet several young trans men have become convicted sex offenders for not volunteering the information that they transitioned. The foundation is working on challenging these laws. (Dear listener: if you want to avoid dating a trans (or cis) person, just ask them ahead of time.)

This badly mangled version of Adeste Fideles uses the sleigh bells and Risset bells I’ve been using throughout the project. It also uses a snare synth and bass drum synth of my own devising, Schemawound’s dirty fm synth and grirgz’s wobble bass synth.

Although I think this is probably the worst piece of music I’ve ever made, my wife said it sounded like an 8 bit video game, so I titled it Angel Invaders. Can you shoot them down before its too late?

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02 — 1.4MB)

I’ll See you Again This Christmas

[play]I’ll See You Again This Christmas (2015)

If you like this piece, please consider donating to PACE an organisation that provides mental health support and counseling to LGBT people. Many LGBT people, especially trans women, face systemic discrimination, which among other things, tends to take a toll on mental health. Although the NHS is getting better on LGBT issues, many people rely on more specialized services like PACE.

This is a song with an unrecorded vocal part about going home for Christmas in a smallish town and knowing that one’s ex will also be there. The two parts were created using AutoMusic, an extremely buggy MIDI program that I tried and failed to use for yesterday’s Markov chains. Sheet music parts are available on request.

The sounds are Risset bells (described in the Dodge book), Karplus-strong strings, and STK Shakers with freeverb.

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:00 — 2.8MB)