My electronic music

E (for electricity, m for) MOTION

After an August break, the first September gong bath in Troy, New York.

Gong Bath

Fix a fundamental frequency F, and also three small prime numbers, p,q and r.  

Now imagine associating (as Euler did) a tone with frequency F * p^x * q^y * r^z to each point (x,y,z) in 3-dimensional space .  On a special plane through (0,0,0), all the points gets associated to the fundamental frequency F.  

Imagine, furthermore, a large circle in that plane centered around (0,0,0).  Imagine flying around that circle and hearing, as you pass nearby points with integer coordinates, the pitches associated to those points (the pitches fall within the range of human hearing because you confine your flight path to that special plane).

Now, no need to imagine anymore...you can just hear here how it sounds (for primes 3,5 and 7).  I'll post realizations with other primes soon.

This process, simple as it sounds (?!?), naturally engages the categories of melody, harmony and timbre, and with shifts in emphasis that simply reflect the geometry of the circle as it passes through the Euler grid.


My Travels in Euler Space

Not a fractal! 

This track is based around a recording I made of my street being paved last year. Other recordings: a dog collar, insect chorus, birds and ambient noise behind a strip mall, and breath, all looped and mixed in Ableton Live. I wasn't sure how to structure it, so I picked up an Oblique Strategies card (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies) and it said "Repetition is a form of change", so I ran with it. 

This is for the Disquiet Junto #257, Remember Noisevember.

More on this 257th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Remember Noisevember: Make some noise” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0257/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

http://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0257-remember-noisevember/5549

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Image associated with this project is by mediachef, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

flic.kr/p/7Z4uNx

Repetition is a form of change

Paving it Over [disquiet0257 - remember noisevember]

Japanese Taiko Drum

Extracto del Concierto de Phil Niblock y Thomas Ankersmit en el Laboratorio Arte alameda, Ciudad de México @Festival AURAL 2012 .

  Jueves 10 de Mayo de 2012

Phil Niblock & Thomas ankersmit (saxofon, Drone, visual)

vienna_7_2012_1

Elliott Carter explored an all-interval tetrachord in his first string quartet and an all-trichord-class hexachord in his Symphonia.  Teemu Heinonen, a brilliant young Finnish composer, asked if similar resources were available in quartertones.   I answered Teemu's question completely for all equal temperaments up to quartertones and a bit beyond.   I was struck by the all-tetrachord-class 10-note chord (or scale) (0 1 2 3 5 7 12 13 15 16) in 19TET.   The existence of even one such 10-note chord is still about 10,000,000,000 times as many as probabalistic heuristics (that work very well in most tunings) would predict.  So this chord strikes me a kind of miracle.  

Here I arrange all 210 tetrachords  drawn out of the miracle chord in a Hamiltonian cycle with each tetrachord disjoint from the tetrachord before and after.   Of course I needed some design to project the individual tetrachords rhythmically, so I've settled on a structure that echos the pitch structure.   Thus I've married each pitch class is a self-similar rhythmic/dynamic pattern that remains the same same if you double the tempo(save for getting a tad louder).  So these rhythmic patterns form a kind of circle-under-octave-equivalence just as pitch classes do.   Though the rhythmic/dynamic patterns for individual pitch classes have a metric/binary character (like standard subdivisions of common time), their tempos relate by the frequency ratios so 19TET (so powers of 2^(1/19)), creating great complexity in the interaction.  

You will hear that my choice here to make each tetrachord disjoint from its neighbors induces a slow breathing in the music; it suggests locally an inhale-exhale harmonic periodicity that actually dissolves as you follow the larger composition.  The self-similar dynamics provide both the shimmering background, the delicate middle ground, and the occasional seeming interruptions (which are actually simply organic to the whole plan).

Miracle I (My Travels Through 19TET-Tetrachord-Space, by leaps)

While the midpoint of this 6 minute work seems to feature a dramatic and unexpected gesture, that moment actually arises as the inevitable consequence of the very, very simple logic in operation from the beginning of the piece to the end.  Careful listening may reveal this logic.  (Hint: pick one particular pitch to follow.)

While  just intonation informs the  pitch structure, the inharmonic timbres only suggest the pitches that they theoretically project.  In fact no (synthesized) timbre here ever gets used more than once, thus evoking a gamut of thousands of distinct but interrelated pitched percussion instruments.

The Inevitable Unexpected

Antichain

Many people associate serialism with what late composer Humprey Evans III used to call "twitchy music."   Here I explore a novel serial technique for a music I might describe as protean or fluid.   

Rows control configurations of attributes rather than pitches or other simple parameters.   In particular they control substructural justly tuned harmonies and the evolving mixes of outputs of six different filters (related related to difference tones) applied to those harmonies.  The pitches matter...but the effects also relate to some of the more purely "sonic" music of our day.

Let the title invoke not only the various meanings of the English word, but the rather different sense it has particularly in Dutch.

Drift

The following may seem like a mathematical paradox: if you start with one dollar and, at a constant rate, gamble one dollar double or nothing, you will almost surely lose all your money sooner or later.  But the average time till ruin is infinite.

Here it's notes not dollars.  A bet either generates another pitch in the same overtone series as the original note (the fundamental of a note a silent parameter) or extinguishes the note.  If the bet is won, the new note gets its own fundamental, and in this way the music, in a sense, modulates.

If you listen I hope you will hear that music is more than the sum of its simple description.

I have realized this process many times, and each realization has its own distinctive character.  If there's interest, I'll add "variations."

Technical note...  Most realization come out very short or very long.  Using some mathematical ingenuity, I have jimmy-rigged the time till ruin.  The result is provably mathematically indistinguishable from running the process till arriving by chance at a realization of the desired length, but is also in a way a fiction, since the code does not actually simulate the narrative described above.

Gambler's Ruin (electronic)

Composer, mathematician, visual artist. 
Seeks collaboration with performers and choreographers.

Please don't spam this account!

My Travels in Euler Space

David Victor Feldman