Hooking up some pedals today, I noticed a nice sound coming from the processing of the line noise from the send bus on my mixer (or wherever it was coming from). I got lost in the sound for a while.
I <3 pedals
Something about the idea of making sounds by processing the latent electronic chaos present in the cables inspired me. I had the gain cranked on the distortion pedals to boost the noise. Then I thought.. what would happen if I put some actual sounds through these things now.
I took a break from guitar practicing for a little while, and had fun just messing around with the studio for a week or two. Anyway, I’m going to get back to practicing again. So I thought i’d write one more track before I got back to business.
More microtonal music made with my harmonic ratio arpeggiator.
I’m playing an upcoming show (the next noise rodeo) where I’ll be using my Nord G2 keyboard, so I was going over some of my old patches, finding the best ones to use. I found a patch called “partials pad” that creates a drone note and cycles through different overtones over the drone to create a sort of harmonic shimmer. I was inspired by the sound, and realized I could use the very same patch to sequence rhythmic Just Intonation sequences. The result was this track.
the g2 editor
An interesting technical note about the G2 modular–the oscillators can be tuned by different methods: frequency, note name, or harmonic partial. I don’t know why I didn’t notice this before, but the partials can also be tuned to the “under” partials, which are referred to by some as the undertone series. The undertone series is essentially an inversion of the overtone series, and a source of many harmonies not present in the partials of the overtone series, like a perfect fourth, or many “minor” notes. Strangely enough, the undertone series is an acoustical fact, and you can actually detect undertone frequencies–frequencies *under* the fundamental– in many musical tones when you analyze them. Anyhow, by retuning the oscillators to these undertone frequencies, the partials above them assumed a much more interesting harmonic relationship to the new fundamental tone. And that is how I got the melodies in this track 
.
Partials Pad G2 modular pch2 file
I’ve been reading the book, Harmonic Experience by W.A. Mathieu. He starts the book by explaining how to build the notes in a musical scale by deriving them from the overtone series. The difference between Mathieu’s writing, and what I have read in other books about the topic, is that he encourages the reader to learn musical relationships by singing over a drone, and directly listening to and singing along with the partials in the overtone series.
I developed a Reaktor patch to help with ear training with the overtone series. Mathieu suggests using a guitar, plucking harmonics from the strings, and retuning the strings to different notes. But not everyone has a guitar and knows how to get those harmonics. Also the sound of a guitar decays quite fast, and isn’t very loud, which makes it hard to feel the resonance of the harmonies. Another problem is that retuning the strings leads to pitch instability. Using this Reaktor patch makes it easy.
This patch was made with reaktor 5.6.2.
Here’s quick tutorial on how to use this patch. First, it helps to be familiar with the harmonic series. The wikipedia article is a great resource, particularly this illustration. Choose the overtone you want to hear, and play it along with a drone. I suggest a very low tone as the drone note, because the most musically useful partials are mostly between 2 and 3 octaves above the fundamental note.
To ear train on a major third, for instance, as shown in the above image, choose the fifth partial. First, play it loudly, and sing along to get a feeling for the pitch. Then lower the volume of the partial until it almost fuses with the fundamental tone, and sing along. Eventually, you can turn it off altogether. If you listen closely, you should be able to hear that exact same partial already contained in the original note.
I’ve included some snapshots in the ensemble of other important intervals, like a minor seventh, major seventh, perfect fifth, and some others. To hear how these notes would sound lower, in the same octave, or even lower, you can transpose the partials with the transposition setting. I suggest using them in the ROOT setting first, to feel the resonance with the overtone series.
To louden the partial that you are listening to in the drone sound, change the filter frequency the same frequency as displayed for the partial you have selected on the right. This way you can emphasize the frequency band with the same partial from the overtones of the sawtooth oscillator that is used for the drone.
One of the most wonderful things about music is the fact that ALL of music, all the materials, can be found in a single note played by a single instrument. And if you learn to hear these sounds inside the note, a whole new world of beauty and amazing interrelationships emerge.
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!