News
The latest Opus+ news and updates
Pictures from Opus+ Debut Performance (17/6/2009)
The performance was a joy; to hear Opus+ creations played on real instruments on a public
platform by professional musicians for the first time was simply beautiful;
by providing a hint of just what is possible it has brought the whole Opus+
project to life in a subtle and profound way. The final line up was
Richard Durrant (guitar and synthesizer), Paul Austin Kelly (tenor and muted trumpet) and Alexandra Urquhart (viola),
augmented by the expert stage lighting and projections courtesy of Malcolm Buchanan-Dick.
More pictures from the performance can be seen here
Debut Performance of Opus+ Generated Music (8/3/2009)
On Wednesday June 17th 2009 at 8pm the Ropetackle Trust in collaboration with the University of Sussex, presents an Adur Festival programme at the Ropetackle Arts centre in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex bringing art and science together. This multi-media event entitled Symmetries, Scales, & The Origin of Everything uses Opus+ generated music as the fundamental basis of a musical composition linking the realms of science and art. The piece will be written for guitar, synthesizer, operatic voice and viola (and maybe other instruments) and feature many chromatic and serial elements. It will be performed by musician, Richard Durrant with opera singer, Paul Austin Kelly and installation artist, Malcolm Buchanan-Dick, and also includes a lecture on quantum physics from Professor Philip Harris, a leading particle physicist from the University of Sussex. Opus+ generates the composition using experimental data from the Insitute Laue-Langevin in Grenoble measuring the Electric Dipole Moment (EDM) as the basis for every compositional decision; patterns in the data are rendered directly into musical structures including rhythmic patterns, pitch, interval and harmonic elements.
New Opus+ Composers' Workshop (13/10/2008)
With the aim of stimulating innovation and creativity we have introduced a Composers' Workshop Area to provide a platform for individual composers working with Opus+ an opportunity to show their work. This area is for composers who are using Opus+ generated material as the basis of composition, to complement their own creative practice, rather than simply presenting the generated material un-edited. One of the most interesting ideas here is to 'reveal the practice of composition as it occurs' where different snap-shots of a single composition are shown as it changes through time to the point of completion. Composers have the space to discuss their process and listeners can then musically trace the changing responses of the composer from the original Opus+ material, through the various unfinished versions, as new ideas are tried and tested on up to the finished work.
Opus+ MIDI Generation Massively Improved (27/1/2008)
We recently undertook a small survey, entirely organized by Thomas Marriott, and as a result of the feedback we have received from everyone who took part, to whom we offer many thanks, we have started to examine a few of the very good ideas that arose. The most pressing issue made by everyone who has seen and heard this work concerns the awful quality of the MIDI files produced, so we decided to experiment with importing the MIDI files produced by Opus+ into Apple Logic Studio Pro 8 . The results have proved quite remarkable! Now the production quality does not get in the way of hearing the composition, and it is much easier to judge the nature of the musical compositions produced by Opus+.
There are now four new example compositions to download from the Opus+ download area which include; a PDF of the score, a rough mix of the composition output from Apple Logic and the original MIDI file generated by Opus+ by way of comparison. These rough mixes were exactly that - 'rough' - and involved only very simple changes to the input data. These included:
- Choosing MIDI voices for each instrument
- Setting the relative volume levels between each instrument
- Adding reverb to each track
- Panning the instruments across the stereo image
No other studio techniques were applied, and there are no dynamic changes to the mix as the music progresses, for example track mutes, MIDI voice changes or fades. We have also updated the download area to include links to MIDI versions of all the existing example pieces posted so far, but we have not had time to mix these down through Apple Logic. If anyone with access to studio software such as Apple Logic or Garage Band wishes to remix any of these pieces, we would be very interested to hear what can be made of them, and we would be happy to post any returned to us up on the Opus+ site.
Let us know what you think!