Friday, June 29, 2012

Call for contributions: YouCoLeLe Twilight

YouCoWhat?!

Maybe you remember my enthusiastic blog post with respect to tunestorm. Unfortunately, the submission deadline has long passed and the organizers do not seem to find the time to broadcast the submissions. That's not exactly the way to make and keep people enthusiastic - perhaps quite the contrary.

I still very much like the concept of a tunestorm: let a group of people create music around a common theme, each in their own style. As a variation on the tunestorm theme, I thought of trying something similar, from now on called YouCoLeLe.

"YouCoLeLe" is an acronym and stands for Youtube Composer's Legendary League. The idea is for people to create music around a common theme, put that music on a site like Youtube or SoundCloud, and tag it with "YouCoLeLe <Theme>" where <Theme> should be replaced with the theme the music was created for. This way, people can contribute without really having to obey a strict deadline. Nevertheless, each time a new theme is chosen, a target date is set, after which a compilation of "contributions so far" will be made. One important difference with tunestorm is this: even if this blog dies or I don't find time to update it anymore, anyone can still find back the contributions by searching for videos/sound streams tagged with "YouCoLeLe ".

So what's the first theme?

The first theme is Twilight. It's up to you to interpret the assignment as you like. The target date is set to 1 september 2012.

What are the constraints?

I don't want to restrict your creative freedom too much, meaning that you are free to create something that in your opinion illustrates the theme. You are free to chose your instruments or musical style. You can create songs or pieces or soundscapes... whatever floats your boat. For your own sake, just make sure that you have the right to use whatever materials you happen to reuse. Legal reuse of material available under creative commons license is highly recommended by the way: that way the new contributions also become available under creative commons license, and who knows: perhaps someone else will reuse your material in their creation. If you create original work of your own of course you can choose not to release it under a creative commons license (although I would highly recommended for The Greater Good.)

Are you going to keep babbling or can we hear some music?

As it happens (surprise, surprise), I have made an entry for "YouCoLeLe Twilight" which you can hear here:

If you want to play it yourself, you can download the score by clicking on this link. Or you can browse the score (without the poem, due to copyright restrictions) here:

Finally...

Feel free to drop me a note with a link to your contribution. Don't be scared to contribute - it's for fun only. It's not a competition, and the whole thing is not meant to judge your work, although it can be a way to find an audience and a way to get feedback on your work if you are looking for that. Better indicate it explicitly in that case.

Unless big disasters happen I will create a compilation of contributions on this blog after the target date. As I see it now, the contributions would be listed with my personal comments on them (if the author indicated they wanted comments), ordered according to the date on which I became aware of the contribution. Should I forget to do so, feel free to remind me of my promise!

I hope to see (m)any contributions :)

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Learn to read notes faster!

Introducing SpeedSightRead

Next to making music I also enjoy programming. I've started a small program called SpeedSightRead which tries to help you improving your sight reading speed. This is free and open source software licensed under the GPLv3 license, meaning that you can use and modify it anyway you like (as long as you also make your new code free and open source software). It will display random notes (from a selection of possible notes that you can configure) and ask you to either type the correct name or click the correct piano key. It has been tested on Windows and Linux systems, but probably also can be made to work on other platforms. Get it here! There's an installshield available here for people using a windows systems. If you use another operating system, you will need to read the instructions on how to build and run the program from source code. It's not as difficult as it looks :)