Just a post with some fun images. I’m going to work on some electronics (more on this later), so I got out the scope that my friend Ryan generously gave to me. Ran the modular through it. How could something NOT sound awesome with waveforms like that. Looks like a shark’s face about to rip your head off.
that's a lot of freqs...
I figured out how to sync the new modular to my midi studio. It has a clock input–so I just send a tempo-synced trigger to the modular from my g2. The line level signal isn’t hot enough, so I boosted it with a simple radioshack amplifier. Since I can move the modular through it’s sequence step by step, I get some nice polyrhtyhmic grooves going.
A while ago, I wrote about a Harmonic Ratio Arpeggiator system that I had implemented in the G2 Modular and Reaktor. I messed around with Numerology sequencing this arpeggiator to get some interesting textures and harmonies.
In this track I mostly just worked directly with the overtone series as suggested in the Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale book by Sethares I just reviewed. In the upper reaches of the overtone series there are quite a few melodic sounding intervals, even if they sound a little strange.
I had a chance to sit down and work with the modular synth again today. It’s a long story, but I had to take apart my studio and put it back together again. With all my stuff that’s quite an ordeal. Felt good to have everything set up again.
Made with what you see up there… and a few pedals, some reverb…
In my readings of late I’ve come across many nice quotes. Lots of inspiring stuff. I think i’ll start posting some of them once in a while.
The cover to Merzbow's amazing album, "Pulse Demon."
A Merzbow (Masami Akita) interview in Audio Culture, Readings in Modern Music:
Merzbow: “… If music was sex, Merzbow would be pornography.”
In America, pornography is often viewed as vulgar and offensive–especially to women. Are you implying that Merzbow is for men?
Merzbow: “No. I mean that pornography is the unconsciousness of sex. So, Noise is the unconsciousness of music. It’s completely misunderstood if Merzbow is music for men. Merzbow is not male or female. Merzbow is erotic like a car crash can be related to genital intercourse. The sound of Merzbow is like Orgone energy–the color of shiny silver.”
I only partially understand what he is saying here but I love it because it is such a ballsy and unique statement. The color of shiny silver!
Chris Jeffs, AKA Cyclob, in an artist statement in the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music:
As regards the electronic music making scene, I feel that as access to electronic music has spread, so any sense of ambition or notion of quality has decreased, and I wish everyone to rediscover the feeling of novelty… instead of treading the same paths all the time. This might happen because too many people use the same sorts of software. These programs have largely reached a consensus on how things are done. It’s really useful and important to me to make my own software, then, because I can aim to sound as different as possible from those who remain constrained by the interfaces they simply adopt. It is very time and energy consuming, but that feeds into the ambition, and I hope, into the quality.
Not horribly eloquent, but I love the idea. I’ve always been trying to spread the word about some of the more unique tools out there–to try and get people to think differently about music composing and production.
My main man McLuhan.
OK, get ready for a long one. A favorite Marshall McLuhan quote, from his essay, “Visual and Acoustic Space.”
We will not argue for the priority of the ear. Modern man, who seems to be in the process of deafening himself apparently regards this as a trivial mechanism. In the West the ear has given way to the eye as the most important gatherer of environmental information. One of the most evident testaments of this change is the way in which we have come to imagine God. It was not until the Renaissance that God became portraiture. Previously He had been conceived as sound or vibration. In the Middle East the message of Mohammed is still heard through the recitation of his Koran. Sama is the Sufi word for audition or listening. The followers of Jalal al-Din Rumi worked themselves into the sama state by whirling in mystical dances. Their dancing is thought by some scholars to have represented the solar system, recalling also the deep-rooted mystical belief in the music of the music of the spheres, which the attuned soul could at times hear.
Lately, I have been poking around in the program Supercollider, a programming language for sound synthesis and composition. I’ve been doing this in preparation for an artist program that I will hopefully be accepted to. If it works out, I will be doing some cool new installations! For previous installations, I’ve relied on a patchwork of different hardware devices and software programs that I already own. I will still do this, but also wanted to get familiar with software that would let me work with sound as information, and turn information into sound, in the same way that I have been doing my visual graphics lately. I think Supercollider is my ticket.
A screenshot of a spectrum analyzer and oscilloscope displaying the output of the Supercollider Unit Generator called "blip." Above the graphics, you can see the single line of code that I used to generate everything in the track I link to below.
Last time I tried Supercollider, I found it intimidating. But, as a result of my experience doing my Algorithmic Drawings and Number Tree installation, I’m much more comfortable with programming and already feel like I’m up and running with Supercollider after a few days.
I found a few nice sound generating options, and thought the “blip” oscillator sounded particularly great. It is an impulse generator that lets you specify the number of harmonics per impulse. Modulating the number of harmonics with an LFO gives a great other-wordly overtone sound.
Supercollider Blip Space Sounds!
Since SC is a real-time programming language, you can just type a line of code, hit “enter,” and hear results. Each time you hit enter, a new sound starts. For this track, I only used one line of code–and change the numbers and started new sounds over and over. A simple thing, but I like it!
It has been a long time coming, but last month, I finally got the analog modular synthesizer that Phil Baljeu, otherwise known as Ruin of Ruin and Wesen, has been building me. It is a one-off, custom designed analog synthesizer with a built in 8-step sequencer. It looks like a communications device from an abandoned soviet bunker.
the synth! to the right is a breakout box that includes some extra modules and a mixer.
Before I get into all the nerdy details, here’s an audio example of the synthesizer. A 10 minute or so jam that was all based on one patch routing. This synth can create many sounds, and all these were made with just one set of connections! Make a new patch routing, and a whole new world of options is available.
I’m not into just making straight gear demos… so I’ve added quite a bit of effects and reverb to the sound. But the only sound source is the modular.
A detail of the synth panel. The top knobs all control the various sound and filtering options. The Bottom panel is the 8 step sequencer with a big tempo knob. The 8 knobs are CV values and the switches are triggers.
The modules included in the synthesizer:
Anyway, that gives me a quite a lot of options to create the crust. The gain on the filter and the drum both make a very gritty sounding distortion. The resonance on the filter goes from smooth to shrieking, and sometimes makes strange gurgly chirpy noises, due the nonlinear response of the filter. The sequencer works great, and is fun to use–the big chunky switches are particularly satisfying to throw. The response of the filter is controlled by a vactrol, so when sequencing the filter frequency, it moves in these big, crazy, acid sounding portamentos. The synth is predictable enough to work with in a logical way, but there is a huge amount of chaos involved in using it.
In fact, the chaos is really what I love about it the most. Using computers, and most pro gear, the results are usually too predictable and linear. This synthesizer feels like it has some sort of evil heartbeat lurking below the surface. And all kinds of strangeness happens when you least expect it. And that is a good thing.
It is a great synth to use for live jamming! Modular synthesizers are known as being notoriously difficult to use for live performance because of their complexity and the difficulty of making new patches in a real time performance. But this synth is right on that sweet spot between complexity and simplicity. Enough options to do what you want, but not so many to be overwhelming. And the 8 step sequencer is surprisingly fun to use. I normally would think that 8 steps is too short to do anything interesting, but with this synth, the 8 steps make me stay constantly involved with a perpetual evil robot funk that never stops. And the big tempo knob makes it easy to start with satanic disco explosion and drop it right into a gurgling subterranean rumble, and go right back again. Tons of fun!
I’ll definitely be posting more about this synth! So stay tuned for that!
A benefit of my wife being enrolled at the University of Washington is that I have access to their amazing libraries with her account. A great thing about getting books this way is that the UW lets you check out books for two months! Lately I’ve been reading some great books on electronic music and music history. My favorites of late have been “Electric Sound” by Joel Chadabe and the subject of my review, “Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale” by William A. Sethares.
This book was best book on microtonal music and acoustics/music theory I’ve read in a long time. It is hard to find books with interesting ideas on composing with microtonal music. There are plenty of journal articles and papers, but I’ve found very few good published books. In fact, the only real book with ideas on composing with Just Intonation I’ve found is Harry Partch’s “Genesis of a music,” which explains Just Intonation mostly from Partch’s idiosyncratic approach, and includes lots of meandering rants on Partch’s opinions on the state of music and his strange ideas about pagan music and the relationship of words and theater to music. So I was excited to open this book and find clear, readable, and precise ideas on actual ways to make music with the content contained within.
I would love to hear any suggestions for good books on the subject of microtonal or just intonation music!
The main premise of Sethares’s book is a method of creating scales based on the spectral content of the instrument or sound producing the tones. To do this, Sethares analyzes the harmonic content of sounds with a spectrum analyzer, chooses the most important partials (partials are component frequencies that are part of every sound) in the sound, and runs this data through a program of his devising that gives a microtonal scale that would create the most “consonant” harmonies between these sounds at different pitches. For example, Sethares analyzes the sound of the bells in a gamelan orchestra and finds that the microtonal “pelog” and “slendro” scales that gamelan orchestras use are not just arbitrary sets of pitches, but are in fact based on the acoustic properties of the bells in the orchestra.
Sethares does some explaining of acoustic theory and it’s relationship to music, explains his microtonality concept, and also gives many examples of how to apply these ideas. It may sound like a simple, or very specialized idea to write a book on, but it is written entertainingly and illustrated with many examples of how to use the ideas to write actual music. All the necessary formulas are explained and laid out clearly in the book, and code for BASIC and MATLAB is also included, as well as a CD of example tracks. The basic ideas in the book don’t require much knowledge of math to digest. Being able to use the ideas, though, requires some knowledge of math and some programming skills. It may be a while before I get around to using these ideas in practice, but I certainly will.
The ramifications of Sethares’ ideas are very exciting. He explains that sounds that would normally be considered very dissonant or inharmonic, can sound quite harmonious if played in a proper scale. For instance, percussion sounds like cymbals or bells that normally sound “off” if played in a normal scale like a major or minor scale, or, especially, sounds made by synthesizers like FM synthesizers that can produce large amounts of inharmonic partials. For instance, Sethares describes, from beginning to end, programming an FM tone, analyzing it, creating a scale with it, and writing music with it. This kind of explanation is extremely useful, and for some reason most of what I’ve read rarely includes these kind of practical examples.
Having these methods opens up a whole new world of timbre and microtonality and exploration of the meaning of consonance and dissonance. For instance, Sethares explains how to create sounds that fit specifically in different equal divisions of the octave, like 10 tone equal temperament, and other equal tempered scales besides 12 tone. Another interesting microtonal technique that explains in some depth is “non-octave” tunings–that is, scales that span the breadth more or less than an exact 1200 cent doubling of frequency. Wendy Carlos, for instance, used this technique extensively.
Definitely a book worth checking out! You can find more information on Sethares’s website, as well.
Hi everyone. I am going to be playing a show in Tacoma in 11 days, at what my friend Chris (otherwise known as infradead) has dubbed the Tacoma Noise Rodeo. There will be chiptunes, my friend playing his modular synth, and I will be playing some drones and ambient music with my fretless/slide guitar, in a style similar to my previous live sets, but this time with just guitar and looper.
Hope you can make it out! The show is located on 6th Avenue in Tacoma at “Caffe Dei.”
Saturday September 17th at 8:00 PM.
The address:
Caffe Dei
2607 6th Ave
Tacoma, WA 98406
Lately I have been working on of ear training, as I mentioned in my previous post. I have mostly been doing this with the aid of my only keyboard, a Nord G2. As I’ve also mentioned before, one feature of this keyboard is that it can (with some tweaks) be tuned to all kinds of microtonal scales.
Since ear training is a traditional sort of thing, and I was studying with a classically trained teacher, I decided to keep it simple, load up a typical piano sound, and work that way. It never dawned on me to explore my interests in tuning with my ear training studies.
Part of ear training is getting a deeply-ingrained feel for the specific sound of different harmonies and intervals, by listening, and singing. I have been doing this along with a normal equal-tempered scale, which is the typical thing to do, and effective enough.
I found, however, that using a just intonation tuning, which allows me to tune to the pure harmonies of the overtone series, gave me what felt like a much more visceral and “real” sound when working on ear training. These are the harmonies that you would hear, for instance, from good barbershop singers or a string quartet. I feel like I am hearing the most accurate versions of the intervals and chords I am trying to learn.
I made some recordings comparing the sound of just intonation, or normal equal tempered tuning. You can see the ratios in the scale I used in the image above.
Major and Chromatic Scale, Equal Tempered.
Major and Chromatic Scale, Just Intonation.
I think the difference in sound is quite striking! It is like hearing the notes all over again, as new entities.
I also, for those who want to hear in more detail, made a longer recording of each specific interval in a chromatic scale. I play each note melodically and harmonically, two times. This is similar to what I have been doing in my ear training routines–I play the notes slowly, and sing along to really feel the notes ringing together.
Just Intoned intervals in a chromatic scale.
If anyone is interested, I can post the g2 patch. Let me know. This would also be easily done in Reaktor!