Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

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fernandoamartin
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Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by fernandoamartin »

Hi. Last year I started to try to induce sleep using some relaxing music. Then I decided to create my own relaxing music. After some months I completed my project creating five pieces rendered with harp sounds, based on the rare and beautiful maqam dilkashidah and using some of the instrumental forms common in Arabic wasla and Turkish fasıl.
I typed the melody in Musescore to visualize it clearly, exported it as xml and imported into Rosegarden where I adjusted fine details and added accompaniment, exported it to midi and rendered the audio using Timidity and free harp samples, since Timidity is still the only free software that I know that is able to change the tuning of a whole midi piece, on the fly, while it's being played, based only on sysex messages. (Does anyone know another?)
After all I listened to them awake to analyze their quality and tried to fall sleep listening to them. Well, now that I think I succeeded in both I'm sharing my work with you.
Thank you for listening and for the attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUIY6M0l8Rc
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sysrqer
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by sysrqer »

This is very nice and certainly relaxing.
What does the title mean? From previous studies of Hindi and Urdu I'm guessing something to do with 'heart'?
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by psyocean »

Really fine music! It's like carrying away to country with azure sky and peaceful clouds :) Listened with pleasure, excellent work!
Guitar and synth tales... https://www.youtube.com/user/Psyocean/
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by jonetsu »

In other words, not music to put on a CD to listen in the car while driving :)

Just joking. The maqam harmonies are rich in their interplay. Can you say something about the harmonies themselves, perhaps which tuning you have used ?
fernandoamartin
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by fernandoamartin »

sysrqer wrote:This is very nice and certainly relaxing.
What does the title mean? From previous studies of Hindi and Urdu I'm guessing something to do with 'heart'?
The title is a technical one, equivalent to what we would call Suite for Harp in classical Western music. Wasla in Arabic and Fasil in Turkish are collections of pieces written in the same mode (maqam / makam). They usually include vocal pieces but I took only some instrumental forms. And Dilkashidah is the name of the mode (maqam / makam) in which the work is written, similar to how in Western one would name a work Sonata in G Major, Piano Concerto in A Minor etc.
Thank you very much for the appreciation and interest. :)
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by fernandoamartin »

psyocean wrote:Really fine music! It's like carrying away to country with azure sky and peaceful clouds :) Listened with pleasure, excellent work!
Thank you very much for the commendation. :)
It's interesting that it also reminds me of country scenery and cloudy or blue skies. The Middle-Eastern mode are full of feelings in their melodic development.
fernandoamartin
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by fernandoamartin »

jonetsu wrote:In other words, not music to put on a CD to listen in the car while driving :)

Just joking. The maqam harmonies are rich in their interplay. Can you say something about the harmonies themselves, perhaps which tuning you have used ?
Can you believe that before using it to sleep I listened to the whole work while driving my car at the evening and I'm still alive to tell it to you? :D :D
The advantage was that the road I was in was in a mountain and had many hairpins and sharp curves, so it's a little harder to sleep there. :D

Thank you for the interest in my piece. :)
Here's a link to some pages of La musique arabe where you'll find a nice explanation of maqam Dilkashidah with an example on sheet music. (According to French laws it may be in public domain.) https://1drv.ms/b/s!AvzM2CpJtL6lg2A8uY1VnMupW9td

When you take a look at the page of Dilkashidah you'll see that along with it's melodic development, it's also possible to form minor and sometimes major chords and modulating to other modes it's even possible to create neutral chords.

And here is a page where I explain with more detail the tuning I use to play Arabic modes, mostly based on a fusion of 5-limit just intonation and Pythagorean tuning. http://fernando-a-martin.wixsite.com/ma ... intonation
In this same site there are also 100 audio examples of different Arabic/Turkish modes.
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by bluebell »

It sounds strange to my ears since I am used to the tempered tuning of the western world.

Can you tell me how you did the re-tuning of some noets? Did you tune the samples as appropriate and make a new sf2 soundfont?

Linux – MOTU UltraLite AVB – Qtractor – http://suedwestlicht.saar.de/

fernandoamartin
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by fernandoamartin »

bluebell wrote:It sounds strange to my ears since I am used to the tempered tuning of the western world.

Can you tell me how you did the re-tuning of some notes? Did you tune the samples as appropriate and make a new sf2 soundfont?
No. I forgot to tell it above. I used this software. http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ It's called Scala but since its popularity is not all that large that are softwares with the same name too. So it's better to take a look at the developer's site.
On scala I choose new / equal temprament / edit and then edit the tuning of each note. In it's options in the synth tab the synth model chosen must be 107. Then after my tuning is ready I export as midi. In rosegarden I import the midi file and what I get is a single segment with a sysex message. Wherever I paste that segment in a composition Timidity instantly changes the tuning of the notes from the place on. Using timidity as output it's possible to change the tuning as many times as you want during the piece each time you place a new segment with a different sysex message.
Last advice: Listen to world music and your ears will soon get used to any kind of tuning. Mine are already. No organized tuning system sound strange to my ear. :)
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by jonetsu »

bluebell wrote:It sounds strange to my ears since I am used to the tempered tuning of the western world.

Can you tell me how you did the re-tuning of some noets? Did you tune the samples as appropriate and make a new sf2 soundfont?
You can also look at the 'NEW SITE: Makam Music – Beauty and Diversity (with audio collection)' thread here in which you will find a link to .tun microtunings (hundreds of them in a single archive) which are used amongst others, by some of the u-he synthsizers (ACE, Bazille, Zebra, Diva). Simply unarchive in a u-he synth directory such as ~/.u-he/ACE/Tunefiles/ if you have many u-he synths, symlinks can be made from one directory to the others, no need unarchive all over. In this thread you will also find a lot more of what Fernando has made.
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by fernandoamartin »

jonetsu wrote:
bluebell wrote: You can also look at the 'NEW SITE: Makam Music – Beauty and Diversity ... In this thread you will also find a lot more of what Fernando has made.


Thank you very much for quoting my site and threads. I hadn't thought my works was going so far to the point of being used by other musicians in other kind of synthesizers. :)
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by AstroBoiii »

It sounds really gripping
Said that it has so few views
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by milkii »

Thank you! Beautiful stuff.

I ran it through the 'Mist' (aka Clouds) plugin of lenticular.lv2 (port of clone of a port?) and stuck it on YT.

they/them ta / libreav.org / wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Audio and related pages / gh

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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by milo »

milk wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2020 8:58 pmI ran it through the 'Mist' (aka Clouds) plugin of lenticular.lv2 (port of clone of a port?) and stuck it on YT.
That was awesome! I loved watching you tweak the parameters of the LFO. Thanks for sharing this little audio play time!
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Re: Dil-Keşîde Fasıl - وصلة دلكشده - (Relaxing Arabic Music for Harp)

Post by fernandoamartin »

milk wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2020 8:58 pm Thank you! Beautiful stuff.

I ran it through the 'Mist' (aka Clouds) plugin of lenticular.lv2 (port of clone of a port?) and stuck it on YT.
Thank you for commending my music and using it in your audio session. :D
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