A Way Its All Mangled (2015)

If you like this piece, please consider donating to Shelter, a charity that deals with homelessness in the UK.

This piece uses both the British and American melodies for Away in a Manger. I found a hymn-foccussed website that had both versions, which was especially good as both were in the same tempo and key, with all the same presets, so the files were already very closely related.

Then I forked wslib, which has some nice SuperCollider classes for reading MIDI files, but the method that outputs arrays for use in patterns was kind of broken, so I made some changed there. Then I wrote a quantising function and made lists of all the unique note, duration pairs (or chord duration pairs) in both pieces. A lot of the same pairs appeared in both. I gave each pair an ID, so that each song could be expressed as a list of IDs

I used the lists of IDs to generate Markov chains. Then I just kept asking for the next one for two minutes and ended a minor chord.

The sound synthesis is based on Nick Collins’s demo of how to synthesize a soprano. I added an envelope to add some unvoiced transients at the start of every note, plus panning, etc.

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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