Creative Codes is a course, curated by Luca Prost, dedicated to musical composition that offers alternative tools for generating ideas, developing them and transforming them into a personal language. The techniques proposed do not aim at a specific genre, but at a method: exploring different sources, observing the sound reality that surrounds us, using signs, structures, numbers and processes to create original musical material that is functional to one’s own aesthetic.
Course content and structure
The course opens with a discussion of creative blocking and the use of extra-musical methods, examining historical examples from jazz, classical music, and music applied to images. The theme of creative-musical personality is addressed, working on both traditional writing and freer approaches. Techniques for transcribing the surrounding environment, transforming urban noises, sounds of nature or other real elements into musical material are then explored, with analysis of scores and pieces that arise from this type of observation.
One module is devoted to graphic music, fromAugenmusik to unconventional scores to more contemporary forms such as the MIDI Art: the creation of music from visual signs is experimented with. This is followed by the study of musical cryptograms, or the translation of words and names into notes, including rhythmic applications such as Morse code and sound languages such as Solresol.
Work is also done on random techniques and random generation of material (with dice, cards, software or procedures), leading up to the twelve-tone and serial approaches, with series construction, transformations and applications even in non-atonal contexts.
The course concludes with mathematical, geometric and algorithmic techniques, with references to Xenakis, Coltrane, polyrhythms and polymetries, to further expand structural and formal possibilities.
