rill (erosion)

For ensemble (4 Flutes, 1 Bb Clarinet, 1 Vibraphone, 8 Violins, 1 Viola)

Written by Adam McCartney, eroded by Thomas Grill

A commission of the Rotting sounds project of artistic research at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, 2020–2021. Funded by the Austrian Science Fund, project number AR445-G24.

For more detailed information on the score and how the "erosion" process works, see the paper presented at the ICMC 2022.¹

Instructions:

The recommended way to build the score and generate "erosions" is to use the docker environments provided. There are two targets specified in the makefile:

Generate original score

make docker-score will run a once-off command inside a container that will result in a generated pdf of the original score.

Start a long running process to generate a series of "eroded" scores

make docker-erosion will launch a long running job that performs a binary erosion of the source files that are used to create the typeset score. The idea of this erosion process is that new editions of the score are produced and committed to a dedicated branch in the git repository. Note that each successful erosion will flip a single bit.

Keep changes locally on custom branch

EROSION_BRANCH=erosion_secunda make docker-erosion

Push changes to remote branch

Assumes push access to remote, this will create and push to a branch called "erosion_prima" by default.

PUSH_REMOTE=TRUE make docker-erosion

Development setup (legacy)

• This project uses uv for Python package management.

• Set up the virtual environment and install dependencies:

  uv sync
  

• For development/editable install:

  uv sync --dev
  

• Alternatively, using pip:

  pip install .
  

  Or for editable install:

  pip install -e .
  

• Building the score: From the top-level folder, run make.

• Erosion process:

  • Create and checkout a new branch by running, e.g., git switch -c erosion_666.

  • From the top-level folder, run ./erosion.sh.

  • On each successful build, a new score.pdf will be placed in the subfolder rill/builds/letter-portrait.

Footnotes

1. McCartney, Adam; Grill, Thomas: The effects of binary erosion on music composition expressed as a notated score. In: Torre, Giuseppe (Hg.): Proceedings of the ICMC. San Francisco, USA: International Computer Music Association, Inc 2022, S. 200-205 https://www.fulcrum.org/epubs/8910jx22c?page=212. ↩