kute

Tags: works, 2022, march, sounds, tools, on hold

It should do the job

I'm developing this tiny notation system to help me analyze and cartography Kiasmos' tracks for my ale project. It's a work in progress, likely to change as the project evolves. It's not meant to provide accurate details of a song nor anything related to music theory, but to identify the core elements and make sense of their structure.

The goals are:

• to keep it as simple as possible
• to lay down the song's structure
• to differenciate the main sounds

It is written as follows:

• A new line for each important event (song start, instrument starts playing, etc.)
• A timestamp, using the minutes:seconds format
• A glyph to describe the event, more glyphs for emphasis
• A description of the sound related to the previous glyphs
• Several events can happen on the same line, glyphs act as separators

timestamp glyph(optional glyphs) sound description (optional glyphs and descriptions for parallel events)

Glyphs list:

[ start loop
] end loop
> louder
< quieter
+ more/fill
- less/sparse
/ variation
~ random/texure
. single sound

Example:

00:00 [ pad [ piano/string echoes
00:16 ] pad [ kick
00:32 . sample [ hi-hat
00:40 [~> birds

• The song starts with two layered loops. One is a pad, the other is an instrument that sounds like echoes of piano or strings.
• After 16 seconds, the pad loop stops and the kick starts.
• After 32 seconds, a vocal sample is played once and the hi-hat starts.
• After 40 seconds, a loop with random birds sounds starts playing and gets stronger over time.