I’ll be upfront with you on this one; this piece will bore you out of your mind. There is some topics of interest though pertaining to how this piece was written. I’ll save that for last though to keep you on the edge of your seat!
First let’s talk about the title of these works: “Parallel Form[0][0],” “Parallel Form[0][1],” and “Parallel Form[0][0] + Parallel Form[0][1].” At first glance you can see all of these work contain the title Parallel Form. That is just to help link them. The next thing you will see is “[0].” This first bracketed number is a variable you can assign differing forms. Since all of these works have “[0]” for their first assigned variable, these pieces are all of the same form.
The next number, “[0]” or “[1]” is in reference to the variation of the form. Here is where things get interesting. This second number can never be higher than 479,001,599. This means that there are a finite number of pieces that you could write in this form. why? Because an essential part of this form is that it is generated by a tone matrix and fixed within the fourth octave. This means that you could only choose 12 factorial (12!) different matrices for this form and because we counted 0 as a number, we have to subtract 1 from this number to correct this giving us the max number that a variation could be assigned.
Because these individual pieces are 65 seconds long, if you wanted to listen to all of the solo works of this form (0 – 479,001,559) you would have to listen nonstop for about 1,000 years! This is kind of scary if you think about it. This uninteresting form could drain you of 10 lifetimes if you dedicated yourself to listen to all of the variations. Imagine if it was actually interesting and was a longer piece! You could waste your whole life in this single form. I think a lesson that we can take from this is that we should be very careful of how we invest our time.
The most profound thing about this is it only took me a second to write. When I say a second, I mean literally 1 second (maybe less actually). I wrote the form of this piece with Java code. If we assume that it takes a second to generate a piece of this form, I could saturate you with 1000 years’ worth of content with 15 years of computing on an underpowered home personal computer. But enough statistics! I think you get the point. Let’s talk a bit more about how this piece was written.
So, as I said before I wrote these pieces using Java but that’s not the whole story. I’ll save you the details about my class files and jump to the meat of what I did. Basically, I wrote Java code to write an uncompressed Extensible Markup Language (XML) file. You are probably thinking, “why did you write code to write code? Isn’t that a bit redundant?” Well, that’s because Musescore 3.1 doesn’t accept java code, but it does accept uncompressed XML files. Also, I didn’t write the XML file directly because it is over 1000 lines long of code (that’s just one piece). My java code including classes was 360 lines total. The code that I actually used to generate the file was 53 lines long. This code prevents me from having to write over 1000 lines of XML code anytime I want a piece of this same form. (Which I don’t want another piece of this form, nor do I want to write 1000 lines of code for it lol). So once, I get the XML file all I did was open it up in MuseScore3.1 and made it look presentable for the video.
As an aside, isn’t there other things that we put most of our time in on a daily basis based on code to present new experiences in the same format? You know! Isn’t it called something like social media?
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