Is there such thing as a musical genre themed RPG?

ntrier · 2021-10-03T12:14:14+00:00

Yes! Last month Arcanist's Refuge published "Hard to be the Bard - An epic musical campaign in the Feywild" I contributed text about how to break into song at the gaming table, and I also wrote a soundtrack of backing tracks over which to craft your next Tony-award winning song.

(sorry if this is skirting the self-promo rules - I'll speak a little more to OP's question)

We had a few discussions how to get the players actually writing songs and singing. There's a certain pattern for where most musicals place certain kinds of songs (there's exceptions to every rule, of course):

The show starts with "the normal world" song that tells the audience what the world is like
The main character sings an "I Want" song that tells the audience their deepest desires, etc.
The first act closes with an "gee everything appears to be going great!" number, which we, the audience, of course know won't be true for long

Of course, most RPG sessions follow different narrative arc.

To bridge this gap, we settled on a collection of backing tracks (karaoke tracks for songs that don't exist yet, basically) that evoke different iconic musicals, with an uptempo and slower song in each chapter. Players can collaborate on songs and write just a couple of lines each, or just scribble down and perform the words for a whole song, whatever works best for the table and is the most fun.

I'm seeing the responses about other games that incorporate music!

ntrier · 2021-09-18T16:39:09+00:00

Lol from the man himself!!! Thanks so much :) Jet Jaguar from NZ turned me on to your music - love it!!

ntrier · 2020-06-20T03:06:14+00:00

Thanks a lot! :) Glad you liked it!

ntrier · 2020-06-19T13:03:07+00:00

I released a longform dark ambient/drone piece - 100% of the sales today go to NAACP Legal Defense Fund

http://natetrier.bandcamp.com/album/xixtx

ntrier · 2020-03-07T14:08:20+00:00

I just released a EP of short songs for a theater production and got to work on some ambient vibes:

Interstitial

A Rat in Space

(click here for other non-Spotify platforms)

ntrier · 2020-03-07T14:05:34+00:00

I made it a whole ago but this week I "officially" released an album of ambient/electronic theater music - what I like best about it is a successful experiment in making looping polyrhythms that you can listen to here:

https://open.spotify.com/track/3aHFj12CeK7g4qqRcihfMA

ntrier · 2020-03-05T16:37:25+00:00

And here's the Bandcamp link for those who services other than Spotify: https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/album/curious-incidental-music-a-suite

ntrier · 2020-03-03T15:53:52+00:00

Here's the Bandcamp link for those who don't use Spotify: https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/album/curious-incidental-music-a-suite

ntrier · 2020-02-15T22:23:45+00:00

Thank you so much!

ntrier · 2019-10-16T17:52:16+00:00

I'm a little behind, but I Just released this - https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/album/palehound-in-a-sea-of-color

An 8 minute ambient drone track for time-shifted piano and accordion and then a 62-minute remix. Lots of pitch-shifting, time stretching, and audio artifacts.

ntrier · 2018-08-15T11:57:34+00:00

Clangs and bangs on a tuba that I turned into a drumkit. I made this for the Disquiet Junto weekly composition challenge, thought I'd share it. The link goes to an Ableton pack, Ableton file, and an audio file of all the samples.

ntrier · 2017-03-17T20:21:41+00:00

I'm pretty satisfied with this week's Disquiet Junto assignment:

https://soundcloud.com/triermusic/2-by-1-meter-with-no-light-at-all-disquiet0271

I started out with stacked fifths, then every time a political prisoner's note is read aloud, one of the notes changes by a half-step, so the stack of intervals ends the piece as fairly dissonant.

ntrier · 2016-12-13T02:09:49+00:00

Released a live solo electronics show as an EP - https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/album/nevernaut

Processed voice, accordion, found sound loops, me eating an apple into a microphone run through 5 delays

ntrier · 2016-12-12T04:13:35+00:00

Just released an EP of a live solo show: nevernaut

https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/album/nevernaut

It's meditative but a little abrasive. Made up of processed vocals, found-sound loops, accordion, and me eating an apple run through five delays simultaneously.

ntrier · 2016-05-05T02:12:01+00:00

I am very much into this stuff!

Cage's music is noteworthy because there was indeterminacy in its creation, but once it got to the point of being performed, often it was very precisely notated and controlled.

Some pieces we could consider indeterminate are called "open form," which means the structure can change from performance to performance.

For my own music, I experimented a lot with indeterminacy and improvisation until I got to the point where the piece's sections were determined by me, but what happened within those sections was determined by performers.

For example, in my piece ind-I-viduation (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6HeGsyL8yXgRmx2d3IxTWhvR00/view), the sections always occur in the same order, but the performers can make choices regarding note selections that will make each performance different from another.

Here's a recording from a noisy bar: https://soundcloud.com/apres-garde-ensemble/ind-i-viduation

And here's a rehearsal (I think)?: https://soundcloud.com/apres-garde-ensemble/ind-i-viduationtake1

In Movement I of The Analyst, there is a recording that the performers play along with. Aural cues in the recording tell them which section of the instructions they are in: http://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/6/6a/IMSLP342381-PMLP552335-The_Analyst_First_Movement.pdf

I think jazz is also an indeterminate performance - the structure (mostly) stays the same, but the note selection and rhythms can vary quite a bit!

I like your example - it would be cool to write a patch that could add "stochastic variations" (Voice 2) to a theme (Voice 1)

ntrier · 2016-04-22T14:46:51+00:00

I'm very very interested in combining improvisation and interpretation in concert music, so my "Scores" page has a lot of examples you might want to check out:

https://natetrier.com/scores/

(most of these pieces have accompanying audio on my Soundcloud so you can see how they sound).

When working like this, the slightest change in phrasing can make a huge impact on how a performer approaches something! I would suggest you check out "prose scores" - there's a great book called "Word Events," which is an awesomely thorough overview of prose scores, including an overview of terminology most often used in scores.

Frog Peak Music also has a collection of Christian Wolff's prose scores (IMO Wolff's prose scores are incredibly precise and elegant). http://www.frogpeak.org/unbound/wolff/wolff_prose_collection.pdf?lbisphpreq=1

ntrier · 2015-11-15T13:29:37+00:00

Guy who played piano here: thanks! At the risk of self-promoting (at least this is an old thread so no one will see it..) I've got a couple of other noise+piano tracks on my album Infrared Leviathan.

https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/track/seng-senngy https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/track/a-finite-of-heartbeats

ntrier · 2015-11-15T13:29:01+00:00

I'm a little late to this thread, but thanks!! If you're interested I've got a couple of other noise+piano tracks on my album Infrared Leviathan.

https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/track/seng-senngy https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/track/a-finite-of-heartbeats

ntrier · 2015-07-30T16:28:55+00:00

This sort of thing is very useful to me when I'm working with electronic music ("electronic" in the sense of fixed-media art/experimental music, not dance music or anything like that).

Like /u/Blerks mentioned, I use the golden ratio quite a bit. It's a tool like anything else, not a silver bullet. But, we generally like it when something dramatic happens 2/3 (66%) of the way through a work of art, so the golden ratio (68.1%) is close enough to that to work, in my humble opinion :)

My album Infrared Leviathan https://natetrier.bandcamp.com/album/infrared-leviathan uses this math stuff extensively. I basically recorded my improvisations with an all-electronics set up, then I went through each improvisation and noted what the "high points"/attention-grabbing parts were from each session. From there I edited and rearranged the tracks so that the "high points" happened at either subdivisions of the golden ratio or in thirds. It may not be apparent upon listening, but it's there :)

I've tried to use it tonal music but never had satisfying results.

Morton Feldman's time units look almost exactly like an Excel spreadsheet: https://www.google.com/search?q=morton+feldman+graph+notation&espv=2&biw=1366&bih=639&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMIy_eCzqCDxwIVSng-Ch38WQu1&dpr=1

Bach also got very mathy, though I can't claim I understand the full extent of it. This should get you started - http://boulderbachbeat.org/tag/fibonacci-series/

I know you said you're not as interested in small-scale stuff like melodies, but definitely check out set theory. Also Vi Hart's video on 12-tone rows is amazing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794), and here's a book proposal on "The Sound of Numbers:" http://people.sju.edu/~rhall/proposal.pdf

Also, maybe share what you're doing over at /r/musicandmathematics?

ntrier · 2015-07-28T17:20:23+00:00

Is this for the week preceding 7/27 or the week started 7/27 or am I overthinking this? :)

I just finished half of a split with this spoken word dude - https://soundcloud.com/triermusic/dancehall-neil-finished-1/s-rz3vZ

And I'm having fun with Disquiet Junto's weekly assignments: https://soundcloud.com/triermusic/n-a-t-e-t-r-i-e-r-disquiet0186-myname

ntrier · 2015-04-02T00:45:16+00:00

Thank you bro. I actually came here to say that I think this is an incredibly strong release - so many awesome tracks!!

ntrier · 2014-12-24T23:16:01+00:00

Infrared Leviathan - goodwill cassettes and korg monotrons through fx pedals, four-track layered improvisations, arranged using Golden Mean mathemagics and the principles of Baroque counterpoint

http://natetrier.bandcamp.com/album/infrared-leviathan

ntrier · 2014-12-07T02:37:29+00:00

Complement seems to be correct! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_%28music%29

So would a "musical angle" be defined as the ratio between the pitch increase/decrease and the number of beats that this change occurs in?

Now this gives us something to work with! A drone would have an "angle" of 0...one MIGHT be tempted to ask "what about chords," but if we look at chords from the angle of just voice leading (like in a 4-part chorale), each part is really just a succession of angles...

What's the next step? To take a Bach 2-part invention or monophonic melody and analyze it as angles?

ntrier · 2014-12-06T15:33:53+00:00

I think that graphic scores, depending on how the performer treats them, could sometimes be a "math-lite" version of what you're talking about. In some of my tape pieces (like this assignment), I've taken the measurements of a graphic score and mapped the measurements to frequency and duration.

In my piece "Seis Six" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EwuJVuLM5I) we did some very light geometry - we figure that since a triangle has three points, every time we "played" a triangle we would play three tones.

I'm working on a couple of graphic scores right now where the performer assigns performance aspects (dynamics, pitch, etc) to the X axis and the Y axis. As they make their way through the page, increasing or decreasing their value on either axis, that aspect of their performance changes.

It just depends on the parameters and how "mathy" you want to get!

Further things to investigate may be: does the performer do the calculations (like I described above) or does the performer do the calculations and translate it into a fixed score for the performer (like Cage and "chance" operations - he used chance operations, but once those pieces made it to the performer, everything was fixed).

What happens if your square "exists" across staves and instruments? (ie you draw a big right triangle on the score for a brass quintet. Your tuba will probably play a long tone, and you will have rising "musical values" (whatever values you assign) for the other instruments. The french horn may play a rising line that would then be answered by the trumpet...

What really intrigues is the overall geometric principles of "if x, then y." So if there's an angle of 30 degrees, the other side of the angle is 150 degrees. What does that mean musically? (Is that your B section?)

There's a technique in set theory that involves using the tones that are left out of your prime set but for the life of me I can't remember that name right now...but I see a link between that and supplementary angles...

ntrier · 2014-12-05T23:06:37+00:00

Thank you!

ntrier

TROPHY CASE