Tim's Music page

Paragon (1987)

Music from the only album Paragon ever produced, recorded off of the only tape I have of it, and converted to mp3 format.

Paragon was a synthesizer rock band consisting of my friend Rich Green and me, at least in its most stable form, while I was attending Duke University and Rich was attending nearby Elon College. We composed songs mostly during the years 1986 and 1987, and recorded an album at a recording studio in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Songs were performed on an Ensoniq ESQ-1 synthesizer, a Korg (don't remember the modeal number), and a Casio RZ-1 drum machine. All songs copyright 1987, Tim Edwards and Rich Green.

Song Format Music Lyrics Synthesizers Vocals Size (KB) Length (s)
I Will Be The One MP3 Tim Edwards Rich Green Tim Edwards, Rich Green Rich Green 3992KB 4:09
Ozymandias MP3 Tim Edwards Tim Edwards Tim Edwards, Rich Green Rich Green 4361KB 4:32
Punjab Jam MP3 Tim Edwards, Rich Green (instrumental) Tim Edwards, Rich Green (instrumental) 3217KB 3:21
Pandora's Box MP3 Tim Edwards Tim Edwards Tim Edwards, Rich Green Rich Green 6177KB 6:26

Music Compositions (recorded)

These music compositions are provided for your entertainment, and I politely request anyone downloading these files that all copies, performances, etc., should give due credit to the composer.

Compositions that I recorded back in 1989.

Song Format Date Size (KB) Length (s)
After Mannheim MP3 1989 4269KB 4:26
Short Clip MP3 1987 771KB 0:48
Serendipity MP3 1989 3226KB 3:21
Trumpet Involuntary MP3 1989 2492KB 2:35
Opus 1, Number 1 MP3 1984 2780KB 2:53
"Opus 1, Number 1" was composed while I was in high school, and one of two pieces I played at a talent show at the Virginia Governor's School at Virginia Tech in 1985.

"Short Clip" is just that, a nice short instrumental clip I had on my synthesizer for a long time, but never developed into anything. It might make a good ring tone, though.

"Serendipity" is a piano piece, and this is a very bad recording of it that I should update.

The remaining two pieces are short instrumental works played on various synthesizers including my Ensoniq ESQ-1 and Mirage sampler, the Casio RZ-1 drum machine, and recorded during a session of playing with a 4-channel mixer I borrowed from Rich.

Music Compositions (unrecorded)

Compositions that I have in sheet music format, but not recorded. These two pieces were composed for a music composition class at Stanford University.

Song Format Date
Sarabande Letter/PostScript 1994
Sarabande Letter/PDF 1994
Sarabande A4/PostScript 1994
Prelude Letter/PostScript 1994
Prelude Letter/PDF 1994
Prelude A4/PostScript 1994

Music Typography

Creating publishable-quality music scores is never easy, but if you need a program to produce top-notch scores, be sure to check out xcircuit on the Programs page. "xcircuit" was originally written for drawing circuit diagrams, but as its major features are 1) catalogs of frequently-used objects and 2) everything able to be user-defined from the bottom up, it lends itself quite nicely to music typography. Note that when compiled, "xcircuit" will install its own circuit library as default, but this behavior can be changed to load the music library by default (see the README file after untarring the distribution). The PostScript pages of music at the top of the page were drawn with "xcircuit" and can be edited with the same (or with Adobe Illustrator).

There are other efforts around to provide freeware for music typography, most of which are concerned with actual typesetting, or having a system which can accept music as a notational stream and figure out how to break it into staffs and pages, expanding and compressing measures as needed, just like a text typesetter expands and compresses white space for correct left-right justification of the text. The goal, of course, is not to have to enter any music by notation, but from a keyboard (i.e., through MIDI). . . or better yet, directly off of a microphone, tape, CD, etc. However, the latter method is a problem akin to speech recognition. Music typesetting is not easy, either, having always been more art than science.

For a wealth of information, see Lilypond, part of the ``GNU Music Project (GMP).''

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