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Four Voice Canon #3 for Computer

from The Theory of Impossible Melody (ART 1004, 1989) by Larry Polansky

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The Four Voice Canons are "orchestrations" of one idea. Each is a mensuration canon, in which successive voices enter later and move proportionally faster. Coonsequently, the density and rhythmic complexity increases from beginning to end. Each voice is a list of all the possible permutations of 4 or 5 elements. This list of permutations, generated by the computer, is ordered by a simple algorithm from elementary group theory: the next element in the list must be as "close as possible" to the previous by a 2-transposition, meaning that two items from each permutation are interchanged to form the next element in the list. For example, for four elements ABCD, a possible ordering might be: ABCD, ACBD, DCBA, and so on. Each piece in the set is a four voice canon of the same list of permutations, but the values are applied to different musical parameters.

In #3 (1975) , for digitally synthesized sounds, the permutation lists are applied to spatial location, envelope, amplitude, pitch, duration and several aspects of timbre. In #3 the duration ratio between all voices is the golden mean; in the other pieces, it is an approximation of that ratio.

#3 wis written in the computer language SAIL, and was generated and recorded at CCRMA, Stanford University.

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from The Theory of Impossible Melody (ART 1004, 1989), released December 24, 1989

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Artifact Recordings San Francisco, California

ARTIFACT RECORDINGS is a project of Ubu, Incorporated, an artist-run, non-profit organization supporting experimental and electronic music based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our download and compact disk series is dedicated to representing a living experimental music tradition that continues to thrive in the cracks between the commercial, academic and classical music establishments. ... more

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