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SongTrellis |
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Two Great Moments in One Morning Two great moments in the development of the SongTrellis site occured this morning, a few hours apart in time. First, around 3AM Roma Golland posted a set of alternate changes for the A section of Sonny Rollins' Oleo. The currently posted Oleo changes came from the first volume of the Berklee Real Book, if I remember correctly. Roma's submission is a big improvement, I think. The chord extensions and diminished chords are closer to what musicians use for these kinds of I Got Rhythm variants. This is the first time that a correction to SongTrellis has arrived as a fully developed chord arrangement. Up to this point, corrections arrive in an email message with a list of chord symbols that I have to consult to correct the source score using the SongTrellis Editor For Macintosh. Then I have to use that to create a new MIDI sequence and printable score, and change the posted sequence and score onsite. Takes about 15 minutes when I'm feeling good. It feels very luxurious to have a correction arrive that I can just point to. I can tell by the way that the sequence was named and the way it's labelled internally in the website that Roma created the new Oleo arrangement with a SongTrellis Workscore, saved it to the Golland personal computer, and used the "Submit a new sound" link on Song Discussions to make the posting. The second great moment: around 9:30AM Ryan Proch submitted the changes to Thomas Fredrickson's Saralon Blues as a Harmony Project. His sequence is exactly what I would have produced if I had known the tune and decided that I wanted to do an arrangement. Since his arrangement was so good I promoted it from Harmony Projects to The Changes, the SongTrellis chord progression collection. This is the first time a SongTrellis member has written a chord arrangement using the Workscore pages, submitted it to Harmony Projects and had it promoted to The Changes. What A Barnraising Could Do The statistical functions available to the SongTrellis webmaster tell me that of the 1172 tunes listed in The Changes, I submitted 1161 of them. That required 1265 postings, since early on I had ambitions to present MIDI sequences that included rhythm and bass accompaniment for each listing. That went by the wayside, eventually, since it seemed that folks appreciated having a larger number of tunes listed rather than multiple versions of the same tune. I still have ambitions that I will teach the SongTrellis Editor to generate decent bass lines, but that's a feature I haven't gotten back to in the effort to build out the site and get the Editor ready for public consumption. The first posting to The Changes, Andy Laverne's Sabra happened on March 2, 2000, a few months after I activated the site in November of 1999. I've done only 15 postings to The Changes from the beginning of 2005 till now. Over the four years, nine months in which I was super active, I was averaging 266 arrangements a year. The funny thing is, if there had been a publicly available method to produce these arrangemnts, all the work that I did could have been done in about two weeks time. 150 SongTrellis members could have produced everything in The Changes in that short a time if they could've entered the changes for 4 tunes during each of those two weeks. When I was doing it, I found that I could enter the chords of a 32 bar piece into a score to produce a chord arrangement, in less than 15 minutes time. The editor at that time was only able to save score images to Mac PICT format, so I would have to spend another ten minutes or so get the score to look pretty, produce the PICT images, run a translation to produce a GIF image and post that to the site along with the arrangement's MIDI sequence. I'm managed to streamline the whole production of pretty scores with the new Workscore stuff so that the production and submission of one tune to the Harmony projects should take less than 20 minutes. Anyway, 150 SongTrellis members cooperating in a community barnraising event, contributing 2 hours and 40 minutes of time total over a two week period could have erected the most popular section of SongTrellis during that short of a time. The Changes are missing progressions for lots of rock, folk and classical music that really should be in the collection. I know jazz procedure pretty well and have the greatest knowledge about how those pieces are put together, so I've posted mostly jazz progressions. Besides that, I'm an expert programmer but a mostly self-taught musician. The experts in other fields (and jazz) could do very valuable things for Internet musicians here. Why are chord progressions valuable? They are a kind of seed corn that allows new music to be created. Like Watching An Ant Farm My friend Dave Winer runs the Scripting News thousands of thoughtful persons had important things to say about important subjects who had no voice in the media of the day. It made me think that it was possible to create a site like SongTrellis. The experiment website. His company, Userland Software, wrote the Frontier and Manila webserver software which I customized to create the SongTrellis site. He did a wonderful experiment in February 1996 which demonstrated the feasibilty of constructing the content management software that blogging and podcasting depend upon today. It demonstrated that there were was the 24 Hours of Democracy website. In early February 1996, President Clinton signed the Communications Decent Act into law. Many folks on the web at the time felt that the provisions of that act would affect free-speech on the internet adversely and outlaw many legitimate sites that had already proven to be valuable and useful. Eventually the Supreme Court struck down the objectionable provisions as unconstitutional . When he heard that Clinton had ratified the act, he proposed that interested folks who had access to websites should think about what democracy meant to them, how they envisioned the web might develop if it were stunted by regulations like the CDA and how it could grow without such encumbrances. They would write essays or create other media projects appropriate for the web that would embody their personal attitudes on the subject. On February 21, Washington's birthday, the volunteer essayists would post their work. Dave over the two weeks preceding the event would write software that would allow the particpants to post the URLs for their essays and projects. His software would record those URLs and automatically produce a set of website directory pages that would allow visitors to find each of the contributions to the project. The software worked beautifully. On the day of the project, more than a thousand participants posted Dave mentioned that watching the 24 Hours Of Democracy site organize itself as participants submitted their URLs was like watching an ant farm at work doing its business. There was a focused labor taking place right before his eyes to build a detailed structure on the web, and he didn't touch it other than to report what patterns he saw developing. (Ant farms were little glass habitats where scientifically minded childen could keep a small ant colony and watch the ant's activities). We haven't yet had that kind of intense, directed labor happening yet on the SongTrellis site, but I have hope that we'll be able to see that kind of thing startup this year. The SongTrellis site is ready for it. The SongTrellis Music Editor for Mac will become available for public beta test in a few days. The Workscore features on the site will let folks easily prepare their own musical materials if they don't have Macintosh access. I think we'll have thousands of folks composing and posting their first musical compositions, who never had courage to try that before. They'll discover how much they'll learn about music by creating it and how much fun they'll have learning about it and performing it. They'll be able to share ideas and collaborate by presenting musical examples that others can learn from and comment upon. They won't be passing difficult to decode text but will be able to pass listenable stuff between themselves. People will just hear and know what you're trying to do. We'll figure out which folks are the best teachers. Having those folks available, people are going to learn much faster. It's going to be interesting to be a particpant or a listener. blog comments powered by Disqus
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Last update: Wednesday, April 4, 2007 at 11:30 PM. |
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