Abstract
In music, patterns and pattern repetition are often regarded as a machine-like task, indeed often delegated to drum Machines and sequencers. Nevertheless, human players add subtle differences and variations to repeated patterns that are musically interesting and often unique. Especially when looking at minimal music, pattern repetitions create hypnotic effects and the human mind blends out the actual pattern to focus on variation and tiny differences over time. Varianish is a musical instrument that aims at turning this phenomenon into a new musical experience for musician and audience: Musical pattern repetitions are found in live music and Varianish generates additional (musical) output accordingly that adds substantially to the overall musical expression. Apart from the theory behind the pattern finding and matching and the conceptual design, a demonstrator implementation of Varianish is presented and evaluated.
Highlights
Rhythmic patterns play a fundamental role in almost all kinds of music
In this paper we introduce Varianish, a musical instrument concept aiming at capitalizing on the aforementioned phenomenon by enabling ad-hoc improvisation with repetitive rhythmic patterns, to which Varianish gradually adds more and more musical layers autonomously–but only if the pattern is repeated strictly
This paper introduces Varianish, a musical instrument concept based on repetition of musical rhythmic patterns that result in the generation of additional sound layers to be added to the overall sound
Summary
Rhythmic patterns play a fundamental role in almost all kinds of music. They structure a musical piece, give texture to harmonics, and they induce effects on listeners such as the feeling of energy and movement. It is natural and unavoidable to introduce small variations into repeated patterns. Minimal music pieces that require the precise repetition of patterns over several minutes by one or more musicians are often hard to perform, but very interesting to listen to, which reveals a particular quality of human hearing and musical perception: automatically reducing redundancy in what is perceived and attenuated focus towards the variations in
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