Episode: 1794
Title: HPR1794: 12-Tone Music and My Random 12 Tone Row of the Day
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1794/hpr1794.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:23:10

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This is HPR Episode 1794 entitled, 12-tone music and my random 12-tone row of the day.
It is hosted by John Culp and is about 14 minutes long.
The summary is an intro to 12-tone music and my random 12-tone row of the day must crypt.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana and I'm excited today because
I've got a special microphone on loan to me from the guy who does our music media area at
the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where I teach.
This is a really fancy, expensive looking, sure microphone that is, what would you call
this thing?
It's in a shock mount mic clip and I think it's going to make my voice sound pretty good.
The microphone I used before is a sure SM58 which is more of a live sound reinforcement
microphone and this one is much more of a studio microphone and Chris recommended that this
is the one I should use if I want to do just spoken word.
And so I thought I would take advantage of this opportunity to knock out one of the topics
that has been on my to-do list for a really long time and that is the 12-tone technique
and my use of a script to generate a random 12-tone row.
This whole scripting of the random 12-tone row is something that came about when I got
my Raspberry Pi for the first time about two years ago.
And the idea was that I had the Raspberry Pi set up next to my bed and it was networked
and so I could theoretically have it play music off the internet and I used to do that.
I would have it stream radio stations and stuff like that like into my pillow speaker
and I thought well I could use it as an alarm clock as well and I could have it just play
some random audio file from my computer but then I had the what to me was a brilliant idea
and this is from a music nerd point of view of having it generate a new alarm every day
and have it be my random 12-tone row of the day.
Now to for this to make sense I probably have to back up a little bit and explain what
a 12-tone row is.
The 12-tone row is the building block of 12-tone music.
Now I have to back up even further now because I have to explain what 12-tone music is.
At the early part of the 20th century I'm talking now about the years 1908 to 1912, 1913,
a number of composers were experimenting with atonality which is music that does not have
a tonal center so you can no longer say for example this piece is in the key of D major
or F minor or whatever it might be.
This is music that does not have a key.
There were corollary movements in the other arts, things like in visual arts they moved
toward abstraction, toward non-representation and so atonality in music is very similar
to abstract art.
Now the leader in this movement was a guy named Arnold Schermberg who was a composer
in Vienna and he had a couple of students Albumberg and Anton Webern and these guys were
very much interested in atonal music and they did not necessarily see this as a break
with tradition but rather as a logical next step in the evolution of music that had been
lately brought to what was nearly atonality by the German composer Ricard Wagner.
Now Wagner's music sounds very beautiful and mostly tonal but if you actually look at it
there are many places in his music where you cannot say for sure what key it's in even though
you hear very beautiful harmonies and melodies and so forth and so Schermberg and his followers
felt like the logical next step was to intentionally abandon tonality and to avoid anything in their
music that would suggest tonality and so they consciously avoided octaves and triads and things
like this that suggested traditional tonality and they had some music that was modestly successful
I suppose in their little circles the general public typically did not like this music very much
it was not very well received because people heard it as something that was very dissonant
they couldn't understand it they didn't know where the composers were going with this stuff and
just thought it was ugly and the composers themselves while they did not necessarily think the
music was ugly they did recognize a certain problem in as much as they no longer had the basic
foundation of musical form that had been in place for a couple of hundred years and that is
key relations tonality in forms such as sonata form binary form things like this the long term
structure of the piece is based on movement from one key to another and then back to the home key
and when the music is a tonal and has no key you don't have this anymore and so one of the
solutions they had was to write just really short pieces where movement from one key to another
would kind of be irrelevant another thing they did was write vocal music where the poetry that they
were setting would give the music its structure but around I don't know 19 20 or so Arnold
Schermburg started to experiment with a new system that would impose a certain rigor upon
atonal music and that was the 12 tone system in the 12 tone system all 12 pitches of the chromatic
scale are considered equal and before I go any further I'm going to play you a chromatic scale
a chromatic scale is the scale between a note and an octave higher but all half step it's the
scale that has all half steps and here's what a chromatic scale sounds like pretty huh all half
steps now his idea was to have a single melody that is the structural basis of the piece this
may sound very familiar if you heard my episode about the fugue where there was a subject that
was the main idea for the whole piece and in certain ways it is similar he also subjects the
theme which is in this case called a row a tone row or sometimes the 12 tone row
he subjects it to the same kind of manipulation that say j s bog would have done to a fugue
subject the row is transposed it's inverted in other words it's turned upside down so all of the
intervals that went up in the original would go down in the inversion it's done in retrograde
and so forth and so what you come up with is a kind of music that is extremely well structured it's
it's kind of fun to analyze these things because you can see where the row is and you get to put
together this fancy thing called a matrix which shows you all the possible permutations of the row
and you can use the matrix to help you analyze the music and so it looks great on paper it's really
kind of fun for me the problem has always been that while I can recognize this rigid structure
and appreciate it intellectually I simply cannot hear it and so a 12 tone music to me still
is not all that satisfying however as a project for a raspberry pie where I'm trying to do something
kind of nerdy and script something the random 12 tone row of the day seemed like a genius idea to
me and so I wrote a bash script of course that's kind of what I do and the bash script takes all
12 pitches of the chromatic scale and shuffles them and then generates a score and I use lily pond
as the main engine for all of this so my script I think I'm just in the show notes I'm going to
link to my 12 tone row of the day webpage and every night at either midnight or 1 a.m. or
something like that the script runs on my server and posts a static HTML page with the 12 tone row
of the day as a little bit of score and also has a play button under it so you can listen to it
and in in general terms the way the script works is that I spell out all 12 pitches in lily pond
notation so c c sharp d d sharp e f f sharp and so forth and then I run them through the shuff
command s h u f which will take them from their ascending order that I just spoke out to you
and shuffle them all around randomly and then what I do is add a series of rhythms to them
and I have a to do in my script and that is to randomize the rhythms now I never did this but there
was a guy I want to say he was in great Britain somewhere who contacted me after reading my blog post
about this and thought man what a what a cool thing to do I'm going to try to randomize those rhythms
and he did it and he came up with a solution and I'll be honest I don't remember where it is or
I don't have it in front of me here so I apply rhythms using the lily pond numbers like the first
rhythm is a quarter note then there is a double dotted quarter note followed by a 16th note followed
by a quarter a dotted quarter an eighth a dotted eighth and then a dotted half and all of these
will add up to you know the right amount of rhythms so anyway I apply some rhythms the pitches have
been shuffled randomly and then I have a block of code that will stick all the pitches in the right
place in a lily pond file and then I run lily pond on this file to create the score and to
create the midi file after that there is a function that will optimize the png file by running
opt png and also it uses the net pbm tools which I planned to record an episode about the net pbm
tools again later but it converts the png file to pnm so that it can be worked with and then that
runs it to png again creating a transparent background by finding every pixel on the whole thing
that is white and turning a transparent and then I run the optimized png command on it to reduce the
file size after that there is a function that creates a block of static html and sticks the image
and the image in there and then it also puts a html 5 audio player and at some point there must be
oh yeah here it is I use timidity to play the midi file and pipe it through lame the mp3
engine and then I use mp3 to aug on that mp3 file to make an aug version so I end up with a
midi version mp3 and aug and all of those are stuck in the right place and a web page is generated
that has the image, the audio file and also has a link to my script that does the whole thing
now let's listen to one example I just generated this one a few minutes ago here's an example
of a 12 tone row of the day beautiful isn't it wouldn't you like to be woken up by that every day
now I never did actually use this as an alarm like the original intent was but I still periodically
will go back to my 12 tone row of the day page and just play the example a new one is generated
every day however I probably don't look at more than once one of them per month anyway hope you
guys have enjoyed hearing about that technique from the early 20th century the 12 tone technique
and I'll have links in the show notes to more information about that if you're at all curious but
thanks for listening this has been John Colp on a new microphone in Lafayette Louisiana
and I am signing off now bye
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