First of all, from a personal and very prejudiced point of view, I think, you should consider having progressions of "cells" and ditch this triadic way of thinking. I often like harmonically static music, I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is that the harmony chosen is of the simplest kind. For minimal types of techno, I prefer static over the kinds of stupid triad sequences we get in pop music and such. However, it's best if the harmony chosen were some cell like, F Gb A Bb B Eb, much less offensive than C E G. If you do stick with triads, consider Wagnerian type sequences and chromatic cycles.
I can tell from the jazz point of view, C major is not what it is in classical music. For instance, giving an extremely simple example, the construction C E G B D F# A, would be a perfectly valid chord to impose over C major. Or, listen to John Coltrane live solos on "Impressions", which goes {D minor, D minor, Eb minor, D minor} -- harmonically static, yet inclusive of all 12 notes (not too mention some sounds that can't really be described as notes per so).
Also, any solutions will be trivial, if they do not have the possibility to produce bad results. It might be cooler, to have a computer spit out progressions, and you choose whether you like it. Perhaps a neural net could learn your taste in harmony?
Technically, this sounds like a job for markov chains.
~David
On 8/11/06, Damian Stewart <damian@frey.co.nz
> wrote:hey everyone
i'm setting out to build an automatic chord progression system - you tell
it to start in C Major, centre around E minor, with a given deviance
factor, and then bang it repeatedly and it spits out a new chord/voicing
each time you bang it, that makes harmonic sense and sounds good as a
progression.
(why? it struck me while i was listening to my friend's set the other night
that too much dance- or dance-derived music is harmonically static. simple
solution: make a quasi-intelligent system that knows what progressions
sound good, and get it to do all the work. imagining coupling it up to
fiddle~ and a vocalist..)
based on jazz harmony theory, which i have had the tiniest of nosies into,
this will involve encoding knowledge about all twelve scales, major and
minor, as well as the modes and relationships between them. before i start,
is there anything i should look at that might help, or solve the problem
for me, or make the whole idea irrelevant?
cheers
d
--
f r e y
live music with machines
http://www.frey.co.nz
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