Since most people have little to no experience with Bohlen-Pierce, myself included, the music can sound alien. A strong recurring motif that is established in the first few seconds of the piece may give the audience a sense of familiarity by the end, as opposed to a series of seemingly random frequencies.

Over the last few days, I’ve been spending my time in front of my MIDI keyboard, trying various phrases and chords, and listening to the results while letting the tonality of Bohlen-Pierce sink in. I had been flirting with the just intonation. I’m now of the mind to go with equal temperament. With just intonation, I had a tendency of writing melodies that were akin to badly tuned 12-tone music.

Here is the Bohlen-Pierce tuned MIDI synth I’ve been using for the last couple of days:

Download: fragments_6.csd

I’ve split the keyboard into two voices, where c-3 and c-5 are two octaves apart. There is a split somewhere in the middle.

4d 54 68 64 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 01 00 60 4d 54 72 6b 00 00 00 08 00 9f 40 7f 60 8f 40 7f

Today, I’m learning how to generate MIDI files with Perl. So far, this has been a fairly straight forward process. This is most likely due to the fact that MIDI hasn’t really changed since 1983.

Here is the guide I’m following.