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Variation parameter for Harmony

Posted

Just like you can draw a curved line in the window for the "Variation" parameter to variate a figure, it would be interesting to do this on a chord progression: Small deviations could replace the chord with it's "parallel" or "mediant", submediant (functional harmonics: Tp , Dp, sP...) and larger deviations (larger distance of the curve from the X axis) with it's secondary dominant  or other chord with just one note in common and so on...


Fri, 2017-12-15 - 00:15 Permalink

Have you tried dragging the Variation parameter onto the Harmony parameter? I hadn't thought of doing this until I read your post. Not sure how useful it is yet, but it certainly changes the progression! Thanks for the idea :)

Sat, 2017-12-16 - 13:39 Permalink

No, that's not possible, the Variation parameter clearly shows in its tooltip that it refers to figures only. 

Sat, 2017-12-16 - 17:27 Permalink

Whatever you drop on Harmony will be converted to Harmony in a more or less meaningful way. For Variation, as for all numeric parameters, the results is probably not very useful. I'm surprised it does even work.

Some parameter converions are pretty arbitrary. We consider blocking them eventually, if they don't make sense. Less options = less confusion.

As for the feature suggestion, I find it quite useful! It's however quite a challenge to define the variation mapping for chords.

Sun, 2017-12-17 - 00:03 Permalink

Less options = less confusion.

Less options = less possibilities.

Often I get quite interesting results from operations that "do not make sense".

 

Sun, 2017-12-17 - 00:34 Permalink

Yes indeed I agree with Juergen - please don't take anything away. I've been having a lot of fun dragging Variation to some of the other parameters lately! Dragging it to Bend produces some interesting results for example. Doing so may not be useful as a whole, but there may a snippet you want to keep. This kind of flexibilty is one of the things that makes Synfire so wonderful!

Sun, 2017-12-17 - 02:53 Permalink

Perhaps the possibility of "nonsensical" Drag/Drop operations should be configurable.

Sun, 2017-12-17 - 10:48 Permalink

Or Synfire could issue a message: "You are now leaving the area of reasonable operations.." Image removed.

Sun, 2017-12-17 - 11:58 Permalink

The more you experiment, the more you find! I have just discovered that dragging Harmony to Figure produces a nice set of Arpeggio symbols which I assume is similar to auto-chords, but with the flexibility of modifying the figure afterwards.

I agree that some of this could be disabled. For example dragging Interpretation to anywhere seems to be a waste of time, although it currently allows you to do it.

Sun, 2017-12-17 - 16:52 Permalink

To me, nonsensical = stochastic. There are several stochastic music generators out there, and I'm testing some of them. Stochas, for example, as well as Riff Generator often produce nonsensical music according to the user defined parameters. A sort of "reasoned chaos". On other occasions, interesting, unpredictable patterns may occur :-)

 

Sun, 2017-12-17 - 16:55 Permalink

To me, Synfire is already somewhat stochastic: it's hard to predict what will come out of a figure. Even a note velocity modification can change the played pitch....