# Group 10 - composition about a spreading virus:

## Inspiration:

The past year reminded us of the danger that virus can represents for our society. As we've seen with Covid-19, a disease that started as a unique case in a far away country can quickly spread across the globe and create a global pandemic. We wish to interpret the dynamics of the propagation of this virus.

> [name=johentsch] Great idea! It is quite similar to what group 6 is planning but the two approaches are dissimilar enough to get to quite different results, I suppose.

## how it's supposed to sound:

* atmosphere: The piece will recreate the idea of a virus spreading through society. It is unpredictable, inspires fear and creates chaos.
* pitches: the piece will start from a single note (the patient 0). Each new note will represent a new case. As with a real virus, notes get infected more easily when they are close by. In the beginning, pitches will be played closely around the starting pitches (the "patient 0") and, as the virus start to spread, the intervals will get larger and larger until the entire keyboard is covered.

> [name=johentsch] Cool idea. You could put some thought into the behaviour of an infected pitch (e.g. you hinted at virus load at a later point). Having continuous pitch only might lead to quite a static impression which you could counter by giving "life" to the pitches (you also mention the idea of using altering instruments for continuing a pitch). E.g. they might travel in their closest or larger environment, e.g. microtonally; they might have different inner textures or texture envelopes, just think of different ways a pitch might be contained in different ways, e.g. a quick sequence of attacks (which might vary in speed), vibrato, describing a rhythm. One way would be to define a set of possible behaviours and include those in your structure/algorithms.

* rhythm: In order to transcribe the unpredictability of a spreading virus, the piece will use a free time anti-meter. The lack of measures or beat will create chaos and further re-enforce the tension. Also, the number of notes will increase exponentially, creating an accelerando in the tempo.

> [name=johentsch] If you speak of free time, you cannot speak of tempo. The term `density` might be more accurate.
> "Anti-meter", to my knowledge, is not a widely used term, maybe you could speak of the "absence of meter".

* structure: As the virus spreads across the keyboard, the piece will quickly become very loud and chaotic. In order to structure the piece, there will be multiple waves of the pandemic. As the waves progress, there will be less and less notes to play since some pitches might have "died" during previous wave, or they could get granted immunity from previous infection. At the end of the piece, the "vaccination" will prevent new notes from getting infected, thus slowly fading out the piece.

> [name=johentsch] Nice ideas there! How should the three waves be similar to or different from each other? Is there an overall development?
> Are you planning to not re-use pitches that were already infected? If you're sticking to 88 piano keys, you will run out of pitches very quickly. One solution could be to gradually use more and more quarter tones (or even increasingly smaller intervals) which would be effective in creating more and more density and chaos.

* timber: The infection of a new pitch will be marked by strong attack timber such as a piano for example. For the duration of the illness, the notes will be sustained with a continous sound, such as the sound of a string instrument. After the infection period, if the pitch eventually recovers, the note will simply fade away and it will go back to its normal life of note. However, if at any time during the infection, the virus kills the pitch, the end of the note will be abrupt and marked by a strong hit sound such as a church bell as a reference to the bells played during a funeral ceremony.

> [name=johentsch] "Timber" means wood, the word is "timbre".
> Maybe it would be good idea to translate a death to a quite different quality than the infection (currently both are strong attacks). The idea of involving a symbolic bell sound is great, but you can add creativity to both types of events. E.g., the death bells could descent in glissandos, which creates interesting and pleasing effects and is very discernable. Also, there could be interesting ways to show how pitches infect each other.

* Another idea is that the velocity of the notes represent the virus load that carries a note. This way, the note would slowly fade-in as it gets ill and fade out when it recovers. We shall see which one works best musically.
* added musical elements: We might add voice overs of real-world journalists describing the pandemic (we will have to see if it's still audible or if it's too much).
* use of stereo ?

> [name=johentsch] Cool idea, if you have time for that, especially if such voice-overs undergo an interesting formal process, too.

## Similar projects:
* Crown and tears (swiss covid music box): The author composed a melody based on the covid-19 pandemic. Each beat represents a day and each note a victim of the covid-19 in switzerland. Our piece will share similar structural aspect, with more and more notes being played as the tension builds up (for example at 2:14 in the video). However, contrary to "crown and tears", our "melody" (or, let's say, set of pitches) will be much more chaotique due to the absence rhytmic meter, scales or repeated melodic theme. Althought the inspiration is the same, we expect a completely different output.
link for the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqfrOPs2pKM

> [name=johentsch] Yes, the idea can be taken to great lengths without the limitation to such a tiny instrument.

# General feedback

> [name=johentsch] This is overall a great proposal and I'm looking forward to the result. Your musical ideas are clearly motivated by your inspiration. At times, you could be more elaborate on local or global effects that you want to achieve perception-wise, as well as on the global development (see comment on how waves relate to each other). Eventually, you need to turn it into a text with a coherent structure, as you are probably aware.

# Feedback Milestone 2
> Very good that you provide a general overview at the beginning. However, it reads more like the description of a sonification than a composition. Remember that the sonification is a tool you can use in a composition, but does not constitute a composition per se. Statements like “Since we are doing music, each country will be represented by an instrument” are unjustified: the fact that you are doing music does not make mapping countries to instruments necessary (nor, for that matter, sufficient). For the final essay, make sure you devote enough time to explain how the music you compose conveys structure and emotion **because** of how you composed it.

>It is a very nice idea to have the video: remember that visuals have rhythm too, and that you can and should exploit this as part of your composition.

>The draft of the final piece sounds great. However, I cannot track exactly how everything I hear relates to your methods. Make sure the explanation is transparent in your final essay.

>“We don't have any particular criterion since randomness is also expected from the music”. Reflect on the sound output you have produced: towards the end, there is a pizzicato of a low string, and then dissonant flute voices that drop out until just one remains. Is this something desirable in your piece? Does it convey the idea of an end? Do you like that lone pizzicato? Do you like the idea that a lone flute will be the last thing in the piece? These are all questions you need to ask yourself! Personally, I found all of this verry expressive. If everything is equally acceptable to you, it is because there is more room for in-depth reflection.

## Composition (Matthieu):

### criterions:
Our epidemic model is non-deterministic and depends on parameters four main parameters:
* the duration of the infection
* the time of the new variant
* the distance between countries and continents
* the probability of contamination

In order to get a convinving result that fitted our initial compositionnal ideas, we had to run the simulation a few times with different sets of parameters. Also, since our model is non-deterministic, there is quite a bit of variance involved. For instance, sometime the pandemic would die before the new variant could develop. In these instance, we would just run the simulation again. Our choosing criterion where the following:

* There must be two distincts waves with a calmer period between the two.
* The pandemic is somewhat controlled, so that it creates a build up before each peak
* The second wave should be more violent than the first one in order to increase tension.

Finally, we ran three sucessfull simulation. We kept the the last one since it was the most powerfule one.

// insert three audio extract

### Instrumentation choices

Run out of notes => more instruments => each instrument is a country/continent (reference to previous chapters)

After importing of the raw midi material to our music software, we firstly adjusted the tempo down to 80 bpm so that the piece "dure" about 3 minutes.
Note: this tempo cannot really be felt by the listener since our notes have been randomly shifted. It is more like a "time-stretcher".
In our software, each instrument can play several
The instruments of every sections (strings, woods and brass), at the exception of the piano, can also play with different articulations.
examples:

After a few playing around with the different articulations, we decided to leave the wind instruments (woods and brass) on the standard, long vibrato articulation. For the strings part, we felt like leaving the playing long notes added to the ensemble. Instead, playing the "pizzicato" added a lot more "shape". This is especially the case in the "summer break" before the second wave when some note would "pop out" etc...

### Interpretation of the piece

Of course this scenario is only one interpretation of the result based on the story we wanted to tell (the spread of a pandemic). Of course, everyone could interpret the audio differently. To have some external view on our piece, we made some members of our entourage without telling them the initial motive, and ask them to come up with their own story or feelings. For example, one interpretation was of mystic forces fighting in a forest with the weak one (the strings pizzicato) getting reduced to silence by the strong one (the wood/brass intense nap). Overall, the proheminent feeling was stress, fear and ...

From these feedbacks, we could have choosen to leave it as a more "open to interpretation" piece, so that everyone could invent their own story. However, we thought that the algorithm at the origine of the music was so precise and detailed in its inner working, that the leitmotiv of the music (namely the covid-19 pandemic) should be explicited in some ways.

The first element we added was voice-overs of journalists. Voice overs samples are quite common in music (insert reference). In our case, the messages they transmit needed to be brief and contains key-word that would guide the listener to interpreting the music as a growing pandemic. Our inspiration was found in the piece "the 2nd law" by Muse, which describes the dangers of our consommation of limited ressources troughout voice overs of journalists.

### Visualisation: the video montage

## Sources for the video/audio extract:

### sound effects:
clock ticking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZFFjn9nOwU

### before first wave:
* early news report (Dr. Faucci): DL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3GxF_6trDY
* "how serious is this?" (0:20)
* "this is an evolving situation" (0:30)
* "the situation still is a low risk" (1:15)
* "wash your hands don't touch your face (3:20)"
* Trump : DL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eB_xCk5ABw&ab_channel=CNBC
* "Totally under control" (0:30)
* "We're doing great in our country" (1:08)

* China says pneumonia outbreak due to new type of coronavirus (0:00) DL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbrXBTJUESw

* Officials worry deadly coronavirus in China
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME6rg5enX9I

* States bracing for coronavirus outbreaks as first deaths reported in US (0:00)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH9ROb67E90

* "we have a new name for coronavirus" Coronavirus disease named Covid-19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK_gq3PC7TE
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl0V-OhZYk4&ab_channel=Channel4News
* First case in England (4:04)
* 2000 cases in 24h in China (4:10)
* "Biggest quarantine in history right now in China" (4:22)

* "First death from coronavirus" (0:00) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KovfCPMJU24

* "deadly coronavirus", "international public health emergency" (0:00)

* Coronavirus crisis in US as more cases are reported https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qow1al_afYQ (early 20 seconds

### Variants
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IuPVEI6eHo&ab_channel=ArirangNews
* First variant in England & Malaysia (0:06)

### Lockdown:

* Prime minister
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gb6KJYFJiw
* "It is vitale to slow the virus down" (2:39)
* "You must stay at home" (2:52)

* "nous sommes en guerre" Emmanuelle Macron (at 1:12): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5lcM0qA1XY

### Variants and 2nd wave
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IuPVEI6eHo&ab_channel=ArirangNews
* First variant in England & Malaysia (0:06)
* "Britain has detected yet another variant" (0:47)

* "Second wave of Covid cases hits India 'like a storm'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAQYcsw8ihQ
* The more the virus can mutate (0:03)
* "India is in the grip of a seconde wave" (0:55)

* "Europe shuts its door to UK"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdjxtANNR60

* vox year summary : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGQQbulRUjY
* "new type of coronavirus" (at 0:00)
* "flatten the curve" (2:10)
* "a possible second wave" (4:16)

* sirène d'ambulance:

* Vaccine = hope : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFNVAyJV7L8&ab_channel=CBCNews%3ATheNational (0:00)