Projects and Papers: Debussy and MaxPosted by admin on February 10th, 2009

I’m delving into a couple very fun and interesting projects for the semester.

The first is a paper on Claude Debussy for my 20th century history class, exploring the comparisons between how he is perceived as a composer, and what his true compositional influences were.  Debussy is well-known as an “impressionistic” composer because he developed a very unique compositional style which generally had a lack of tonal center and often felt ungrounded in a particular key.  The great irony is that Debussy did not care for his works to be referred to as impressionistic.  I found this very surprising when we discussed it in class, so I decided to make it my final paper project.  More to come on that…

I am also working on a live composition piece involving Max/MSP, as I mentioned earlier.  The piece is starting to come along, and I have made a really interesting and useful patch that creates loops at various speeds and lengths. 
There are actually four simultaneous loops that are created from taking a sample from any audio file or live sound recording.  The fun part about using Max is that you can make the program do things that wouldn’t be possible with any other software program.  More to come on that as well…

It’s looking like a warm and beautiful day today!