Introduction
This post completes the material from Part 2. The original post was so large that I got a warning that the post was too long for email, so I had to break it into three parts. The first part was a combination big ole disclaimer and a whining post about how Facebook muted one of my videos, claiming I may have violated someone’s copyrights! The second part elaborated upon my theory on music neighborhoods. This third part gives some examples of creating a new melody from the neighborhood of a known good melody.
Examples of Neighborhood Points
In all the samples shown below, sample points were taken from the Intermediate Family Musical Point Set (IFaMPS). This subset limited the available pitches to only those pitches used by the reference melody.
The first example used the melody “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” as a reference melody. In the figure below, the reference melody is at the bottom and 5 samples generated at various runs (i.e., run 10, run 50, run 100, …) are shown above
Neighbor 1
Neighbor 5
The second example used an up then down scale progression.
Neighbor 1
Neighbor 5
The third example was composed using a scale progression of third and fourth intervals. I then replaced the eighth note on the third beat with a rest to make some syncopation.
Neighbor 1
Neighbor 5
The final example used a well-known melody as the reference. Do you recognize it?
Neighbor 1
Neighbor 5
Summary
An alternative approach to using this process would be to come up with a “format” for what you want your melody to “look” like instead of using a known melody. This format would have your desired note durations and rest locations. Then you would put down pitches for each note to give a pleasing sound. This would complete step 1. Next, you would complete the following steps. So instead of starting with a known good point, you would start with a melody of desired form, hoping to end up with a better melody.
Wow, such a long article! Sorry I had to break it into parts! Well, I hope you enjoyed it. Like I said before, just take everything I have said with a grain of salt! Try it out and see if it works for you. Sorry to take so long to get these parts out. I recently passed a 11cm kidney stone, and this was soon followed by catching a mild case of covid (complete with brain fog (dizziness))! Maybe “someone” (or “some all”) was (were) trying to give me some feedback on “their” or “his” or “her” opinion of my musical ideas? LOL