Unlike a physical grand piano, a physical synthesis instrument, such as one of Pianoteq’s series of grand pianos, is not necessarily constrained at any moment to a single tuning system. This article discusses why a system using discrete piano pitches (not sliding pitches) chosen freely among the audible pitch continuum presents interesting musical and expressive possibilities. Audio and video of compositions and an improvisation exploiting the system demonstrate its potential and a performing interface for it.

The authors discuss how to control outputs from deep learning models of text corpora so as to create contemporary poetic works. They assess whether these controls are successful in the immediate sense of creating stylometric distinctiveness. The specific context is the authors’ piece The Character Thinks Ahead (2016–2017); the potential applications are broad.

Serial music, which is mainly non-tonal, superimposes compositional freedom onto an unusually rigorous process of pitch-sequence transformations based on ‘tone rows’: a row is usually a sequence of notes using each of the 12 chromatic pitches once. Compositional freedom comprises forming chords from the sequences, and in multi-strand music, also in simultaneously presenting different segments of pitch-sequences. The present project coded a real-time serial music composer for automatic or interactive music performance. This Serial Keyboardist Collaborator can perform keyboard music which is impossible for a human to realize. Surprisingly, it was also useful in making more tonal music based on the same rigorous pitch-sequence generation.

I define a new set of microtonal scales based on the prime number series, and containing 41 to 91 pitches spread over the whole audible range, rather than subdividing the octave. I designed these scales for metaphorical purposes, and applied one within my performance piece Ubasuteyama (2008), written with Hazel Smith, for speaker, computer sound and digital processing. Simple timbres using partials bearing prime number ratios to their fundamental were also used to embody the scale. The scales and timbres will be amongst the subjects of cognitive studies of pitch combinations, of large and unbroken pitch intervals in melodies, and of the relation between scale and timbre.