Moonlight Sonata 1st Movement

Creations & Ideas
1

Hello all,

this time I produced a classical timeless song, Beethovens Moonlight Sonata 1st Movement.
Again done completely with Sonic Pi.
You can listen to it here:

Cu and have some nice days with your friends and family :slight_smile:

6 Likes
2

One of my Beethoven favourites :heart:
Are you happy to share the code too? :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

Hello Ethan,

not as of now. The piano is based on samples I invested quite a lot of work on, so it cannot be played without the additional samples. Maybe later, I will publish it together with the samples.

Cu :slight_smile:

4

No problem, would be great to see how it was constructed some day, but it still sounds lovely all the same :grin:

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Thank you :slight_smile:

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Cool, did you make the piano samples yourself or get them from another source?

7

Hi Sam,

I used the Upright Piano of the VSCO CE as a base. Only used the loudest dynamics of the samples, as the rest had too much noise and errorsounds. I reduced the strong hammering/mechanics sound of these samples with quite a lot of equalizerworks, normalized them to 0dBFS for better use in Sonic Pi and noise reduced them. This was done in Audacity. After it I worked on my piano framework for Sonic Pi. In it I created 8 dynamics classes through some kind of attack mangling, amplitude mangling and fitting low pass filtering to reduce the harmonics of the quieter dynamics, as it is normally the case for quieter sounds of the piano. So that I get a quite useable piano with more expressivness.
Maybe I will work even more on this, to get it in an even better shape. But for next I want to concentrate on string instruments like violin etc. Hope to get nice articulations there, will test this on a Mozart piece most likely.

Cu.

8

Hi again,

I created a bit faster and refined version. Maybe you like that better. You can find it here:

Cu.

2 Likes
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I enjoyed listening to this. I have produced quite a lot of classical music renditions using Sonic Pi, but have not previously looked at Beethoven, as it is not easily to play his music on Sonic Pi, compared to composers like Bach, or early renaissance works, both of which I have worked on a great deal. However inspired by your version I decided to have a go myself. The first problem is to reproduce the notes using Sonic Pi. I split the source into 7 discrete parts played at the same time in threads. This worked OK using the built in Piano synth, although it sounds rather wooden. I then married it up with work I did a few years ago to integrate the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra samples with Sonic Pi. Unfortunately this is no longer distributed by Mattias Westlund, but I have found an alternative source from which it can still be downloaded.
Utilising the samples, and with some attention to balancing the different parts I have achieved a reasonable rendition of the movement, although I have not done an in depth sample manipulation as you seem to have undertaken. I did attempt to tweak a couple of samples (for notes f#4 and a4 which were a bit prominent, by reducing their level in Audacity but nothing else.
I posted a video of the final result on youtube, and the code is available on my gist site. I have also posted code for a version using built in piano synth in Sonic Pi, but this is a bit inferior and sounds rather wooden in comparison.

2 Likes
10

Hi Robin,

nice work from you, too :slight_smile:
For the samples I didn’t use the SSO collection because of already integrated reverb and the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license (similar to CC-BY with some additional restrictions), VSCO was the way to go for me there and yeah, it was a lot of samplework :smiley:

I wish you all some nice holidays.
Cu.

1 Like