Jan Beran’s ‘Winter711’, fractional Brownian motifs, long-range interdependence

D    reams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again. And this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
  —  Anaïs Nin.

A new year; an occasion for us to meditate on how our mutual feelings and actions—our own; those of friends and family members—are meaningfully intertwined over long stretches of time.

H ere’s an MP3 of Jan Beran (piano) and Christopher Raphael (oboe) performing Beran’s ‘Winter 711’. Beautiful and evocative of long-range interdependence/entanglement.

I f you’re interested, some of the mathematical underpinnings of the compositional method used to create ‘Winter 711’ can be found in the links below. Happy New Year!

I   believe it is not possible to coordinate musical parts in a purely responsive manner. That is, a system that simply triggers its events on the detection of notes in the solo part will perform badly in most musical contexts. This is due, in part, to the inherent detection latency that is built into the problem which makes the responsive system perpetually late. Instead, Music++ schedules the accompaniment’s note times by continually predicting into the future based on what it has currently observed.”
  —  Chris Raphael, Indiana Univ.

J    an says of ‘Winter711’ that he tried to avoid any familiar sense of musical flow. In other words Jan’s music doesn’t give the performer (and listener) the usual cues needed to rhythmically organize the music. While the music is sometimes highly rhythmic, many sections contain no recognizable steady pulse, nor clear points of emphasis whose times differ in simple ways, as in much mixed meter music. While I think these pieces are engaging on their own terms, they work as a wonderful showcase for the [sequencer] accompaniment system, since I doubt they could be played by an all-human ensemble.”
  —  Chris Raphael, Indiana Univ.

• Jan Beran page at Universität Konstanz, Fachbereich Mathematik und Statistik
  
• Raphael C. Jan Beran: Mist Covered Mountains and Winter711. Informatics/Musicology, Indiana Univ, 2011.
  
• R-system package ‘longmemo’ [R port of S code originally by Jan Beran]
  
• R code for simulating Gaussian and fractional Gaussian timeseries
  
• AndrewO. Jan Beran & Christopher Raphael: Chamber Music, 2003-2006. ClassicalMusicThoughts blog, 08-SEP-2008
  
• Chris Raphael’s Music++ page at informatics.indiana.edu
  
• Musicplusplus.net site
  
• Beran J. Statistics in Musicology. Chapman & Hall, 2003.
  
• Beran J. Statistics for Long-Memory Processes. Chapman & Hall, 1994.
  
• Beran J, Mazzola G. Immaculate Concept. (SToA, 2001.)
  
• Davis R, Harte D. Tests for Hurst effect. Biometrika 1987;74:95–102.
  
• Mandelbrot B, van Ness J. Fractional Brownian motions, fractional noises and applications. SIAM Rev 1968;10:422-37.
  
• Mazzola G. Elemente der Musikinformatik. Birkhäuser, 2006.
  
• Mumford D, Desolneux A. Pattern Theory: The Stochastic Analysis of Real-World Signals. A.K. Peters, 2010.