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One autumn afternoon last century I had a wonderful time playing with a digital piano and my favourite music software. I was adding various echoes to the notes, as well as changing the pitches of the echoes; that's something that can't normally be done with echoes, and it made everything much more interesting and enjoyable. Some echoes stopped when I stopped playing the note, while others were unaffected by how long I held the note. Some of them happened at the same time and, being of different pitches, sounded like chords. As I played I kept making adjustments in the software until finally, after a few hours, I didn't think there was any more fine-tuning to do. So I recorded a 10-minute improvisation. A few days later I chose my favourite parts, did some editing, and ended up with a piece about 4 minutes long. It was quite energetic and reminded me of some of my favourite pianists named Keith - Keiths Emerson, Jarrett and Tippett - so I called it Vitamin K. I'd created a 4-minute piece for my forthcoming album of imaginative electronic music, Figments. But something quite important had happened as well, something far more significant than merely creating a 4-minute piece of music - I'd discovered a new way of creating music! Well, it was new for me. It was fun and exciting. It enabled me to do things that can't be done with two hands on an 88-note piano keyboard. It combined my two greatest musical loves: piano playing and musical computer programming. It sounded and felt natural and organic, but also had many of the benefits derived from hours of careful editing in a computer music studio. And it could be performed live. Exploring interesting and/or exciting music beyond what has been done before is, as far as I can tell, the absolute epitome of what a composer would want to do, and it seemed that I had found my little niche in the world of composing. So over the next few years the idea developed in my head, and when the Inner Resting Music idea came up it was natural for me to do a piano album making extensive use of this computer-assisted piano playing. Vitamin K was too energetic for an album of relaxing music, but it had spawned a way of creating music that could be applied to many different styles, including relaxation music. So that's how Shades of Ivory came about. It has been created, recorded and edited in a computer, and every sound is made by a digital piano. It has unusual arrangements comprised of...
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