Grace Notes Music Studio

The idea of improvisation scares the beejeezus out of many musicians, especially those who learned to play their instrument side by side with learning how to read music. Knowing how to read music is a valuable skill. But when you stop and think about how you learned to speak your native language, you will realize that you learned to read well after you learned to speak the language.

This philosophy of learning is appropriate to learning the language of music as well. Today’s edition of Musician’s Motivator addresses how you can develop your musical speaking skills. For today, you can give your music reading skills a rest!

Benefits of Improvisation

It’s not just for jazz musicians. Bringing improvisation into your regular practice will enhance your ability to listen. And not just to music. I have found that as a result of practicing improvisation, I bring another level of awareness to conversations I have with people.

Regular musical improvisation naturally increases your attention in musical settings as well; whether you are in a musical group as one of the players or in the audience listening. In symphonic band rehearsals, I hear more of the other instruments playing. I have been pleasantly surprised by the sound of the tuba and bass clarinet playing softly in unison while I was counting measures to my next entrance; or noticing the oboe trilling above a clarinet choir. As an audience member, listening to the recent Washington Wind Symphony performance of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was a treat, enriched by my own regular improvisation practice.

But Wait, There’s More!

Another benefit to regular improvisation is enhanced creativity. You will find that a little bit of creativity, no matter how small, begets more creativity. It’s like smiling at strangers on your morning walk. They usually smile back!

After establishing a regular improv practice, you may find yourself drawing more, re-arranging items on your dresser aesthetically, wearing more colorful clothing, climbing a tree, writing a short story for your children, or planning the planting of your front garden area. All this as a result of improvisation!

A habit of improvisation practice also leads to composing and arranging music. After all, improvising is just that – composing music. It just needs to be written down.

How To Practice Improvisation

Here are two exercises that anyone can do to develop the improvisation muscle. They are from my forthcoming book, Truly FUNdamentals – The Most FUN Musical Warmups Ever!

1. Take Three
2. On The Air!

Take Three

Choose any three tones that you can play on your instrument. Play those tones using any rhythm and note values. Play only those three pitches. You may include the upper and lower octaves of those three tones. Remember to use rests in your rhythms! Long note values, short note values, various articulations – all are welcome. Give yourself plenty of time to explore these three notes.

On The Air!

Turn on your radio and play along. Many radio stations specialize in one genre of recorded music. You can chose from jazz, pop, oldies, classical, folk, rock, opera, and many others. I recommend that you start with a style of music you like and with which you are familiar.

1. Pick your channel.
2. Raise the volume sufficiently so you can hear the radio music over your own instrument.
3. Listen!
4. Match the predominant tones first. This will help you establish the key center.
5. Play the melody (if it’s a song you know) or play a blending melodic line.

If radio is too old-school for you, try these online music resources: Pandora, and Musicovery.

Speak Up

Share your improv fun on my blog or drop me an email: meg@meggrace.com.

If you liked this, you may also want to read: Fueling Up At The Inspiration Station. A few months back I wrote about this exercise designed to get you playing and making music on a regular basis. Fifteen minutes of blowing into your horn, an experiment to make practice happen.

• Other recommended articles: Who, Me? Creative?
• Is There Music in The City Skyline?
• Drawing Down The Music

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What if each pixel in an image corresponded to a specific pitch? What if the brightness level of a pixel determined the length of the note? What if the RGB value of each pixel created three-part harmony?

Seeing Music In Color

Music has many mathematical elements contained therein. The idea to apply pitch to pixels is the concept behind the free software, RGB Music Lab, by Kenji Kojima.

I downloaded RGB Music Lab to try my hand at composing with a picture. During my travels in Turkey last April, one of my traveling companions took this photo of me. Hmmm… I wonder what music I look like, er uh…can I see how I sound?

In this image, I am boating on the Bosphorus Strait, the waterway separating Europe and Asia.

Pixelated Composing

To get started composing, open RGB Music Lab and drag an image onto the right panel, on top of the Mona Lisa image. The program reads the pixels row by row, from the top left to the bottom right pixel, and generates your music.

The settings can be fine-tuned on many levels. For my first piece, I kept most of the default settings and only changed instruments to 3 saxes (Sopr, Alto, Tenor) and increased tempo to 160 BPM. The result is a one minute and 24 second piece. It’s very twitchy, not at all what I imagined this image would sound like! Listen, if you are into twitchy music.

Reduce The Input

I wondered if I took just a snippet of the image; in this case the part of my face centered on my eyes; how would the song change? It turns out, I can’t just change one thing! In addition to changing the image, I adjusted the tempo, the intervals, the tonality, and the instrumentation. Now, this is getting interesting! The result is a 16-second piece, Eyes!

Now to really speed it up! Ooh, I like this two seconds of music.

A Monochromatic Soundscape

In much the same way that a composer works on her project by tweaking and massaging a beginning musical idea or phrase, I continued modifying the image source. After all, it’s the pixels and their RGB values that are providing the foundation for the sound of these compositions.

When listening to Eyes!, I found the last few rows of pixels were more interesting to me than the rest of the music. These rows were very monochromatic in their palette. For that reason, I cut a piece of the monochromatic water from the image and brought that into RGB Music Lab.

This time, I set the instrumentation to voices by choosing #54 Ooh Choir. There are 142 different instruments with everything from clarinet and trumpet and tuba to Rain and Gunshot and Dog. There are nine different types of drum kits, and about that many types of guitars, pianos, and basses.

I also changed the tonality to F harmonic minor. You can choose from major and minor scales, pentatonics, blues, and Gypsy scales. Or you can create your own scale! For a free program, Kenji Kojima has included many features.

In-Depth Free Program

You can have some serious fun exploring all the different settings. I wanted to continue playing with this application and enjoy the sound combinations produced. But if I did that, this edition of Musician’s Motivator wouldn’t get written!

Here is the final (for now) version of Bosphorus Strait by RBG Music and Meg Grace. Enjoy!

If you choose to download this program and compose with your own images, I’d enjoy hearing the music you create. Please send me a link to your composition or send the file itself. Also, let me know whether I can share it with my readers or keep it to myself.

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