Harmonic Decomposition

If you already know something about music theory you may find this section to be overly simplistic and utterly wrong in places. This might be a good time to flee. As for the rest of you, read on! Lots of good info here.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- J. S. Bach (on playing the church organ)

Eventually Instrumentation will have two chording keyboards. This provides more control than the average trumpet has and those guys make music all the time (seriously, you can't shut them up). Making music is also an obvious requirement for a universal translator and human-computer interface.

I'm sure that there will be several 255 note scales in the music area, but creating music with those scales would be difficult at best (unless you regularly transpose base sixteen to base twelve in your head). I doubt that even 'real' musicians will do a lot of composition using those scales directly. (and don't get me started on "twelve tone")

To those of us who like music without 'understanding' it, music is mostly a rhythmic and harmonious series of notes. Creating those notes should be a snap for anyone who can hum (this is the part where musicians are probably frothing at the mouth). We're going to look at some ways that music can be simplified and partially automated (now they're flopping around on the ground).

An autoharp is an instrument that selects chords while the musician strums a melody. This makes it impossible to play a 'wrong' note (we don't need to worry about the musicians any more. if they were still reading their heads just exploded). Instrumentation 'improves' on this by providing chorded keyboards instead of strings (like a Dolceola). All you need to worry about is the timing of the notes and whether they are going up or down (this is called melody).

So, the process for making music is as follows:

Pick two to five chords
Pick a pattern for the chords

like D major, A major, B minor, F♯ minor, G major, D major, G major, A major and repeat

Play a series of notes while the chords are playing
Record your 'music' and then play it back
Try changing the key signatures

this will change the 'mood' of the music

Impress your friends

assuming that they don't know how you created the music

That's pretty much everything. I'm not going to try to describe the physical interface because I have absolutely no idea how it would work. This will require a lot of experimentation to find the most comfortable way to use the keyboards.

I know some of you are thinking, "We don't need Instrumentation for this!!". That is true, but once Instrumentation has absorbed all other forms of interaction, it is nice to know that you will still be able to make music.