Music

Status: dormant, parts stale; 2005-2007 (supersedes any conflicting remarks left on this page; see the home page for definitions)

Here are music that I have composed and recordings of others' music that I have played.

My compositions[# Top]

My best compositions, including all the ones currently described here except the hymn tune, were done in my high school music classes in 2005-2007, as I rarely found the motivation to make the effort to compose good, original music otherwise.

These five compositions each have a MIDI file of the music, a synthesized WAV file (large), a score as PDF, and (in the cases of "Part Writing" and "Dream Chorale") an explanation.

• Part Writing (dormant; 2006): A somber four-part piece in c# minor.
• Dance and Variations (dormant; 2006): A piano piece in 3/4 time that moves through several keys with lots of eighth notes.
• Go to the Place (dormant; 2006): A fun song in C major for piano and drum set.
• Dream Chorale (dormant; 2007): A piece in g minor for flute, piano, and drum set with lots of unusual/spooky chords and a fast middle section in Eb major.
• Traveller (dormant; 2007): A vigorous piano piece with a strong beat and sections that vary in tempo and key.

Notes about the synthesized WAV files: I made them with TiMidity++ using Freepats 20060219 patches (instrument sounds), so they should be fine to redistribute.  Unfortunately, in Go to the Place and Dream Chorale, some of the drums didn't seem to sound correctly.

I have a few more compositions of note (ha ha) that are not currently public:

• A musical setting of "The Road Not Taken".  Wikipedia says the poem is out of copyright, so there's no issue there.  However, I made my version with GarageBand and have only the GarageBand file and the audio file, which includes copyrighted audio clips from GarageBand.  I may be able to release the GarageBand file if I can confirm it isn't encumbered by others' copyrights.  Preferably, I could release a file (MIDI, MusicXML, whatever) containing only the notes that I know are my own work; I could re-transcribe those notes manually, or maybe someone can help me extract the MIDI from the GarageBand file so I could then take the subset of notes.
• An arrangement of the "A" section of "The Entertainer".  Wikipedia says the original song is out of copyright, but this composition has the same problem as the previous one in that I did it with GarageBand and would have to extract the part that I know is my own work or from the original song.
• A hymn tune in "common meter double", composed in 2016, that needs a name.  Releasing this is just a matter of writing it down in a form useful to others, unlike my personal terse textual notation. :)

If you want any of these, please email me; in the first two cases, please let me know if you can help with the conversion.

Recordings of others' music[# Top]

I made these recordings with the Voice Rec application on my trusty Sony Clié PEG-NX60.  My playing is far from perfect; you can probably find better recordings on the web.

Note: The recordings are in IMA ADPCM format.  If you have trouble playing them, email me and I will be happy to convert them to a different format. Some of the recordings seem to have a lot of distortion.  If you have an idea of how to fix them, please email me; otherwise I might do them over.  When I play the recordings on Linux with sox, sox seems to introduce even more distortion, but it stops doing so if I tell it to reduce the volume with -v .01 and increase the volume of my speakers to compensate.

Note: On 2007.02.26, I removed my recordings of music by Dohnányi, Kabalevsky, and Olson because the original music might be subject to copyright.  On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the music by Bach and Grieg is in the public domain.

Bach's French Suite #5

Grieg's From Holberg's Time (piano version)