Our piano has some unfortunate problems; a few of the keys buzz and my regular tuner said he'd have to call a specialist to deal with those. So it's like a "prepared piano" except it was not done on purpose. I also sat down with no preconcieved notions of what I was going to play. The title, "Unprepared Piano", is a pun which refers to both of these.

I recorded this with my Zoom H4N, and the only post-processing I did was adding some compression and cutting silence from the ends, both done with SoX.

Forgive my indulgence in posting this entire extended piece, which would no doubt be better edited down to a few representative sections. If I were to judge which bits were worthy of inclusion, though, I'd probably end up throwing the whole thing out.

Unprepared Piano

Composed and performed by my 5-year-old son, Duane Cahoon.

Bluebird Socks

I used my Korg NanoKontrol2 -- a device usually used for mixing with a DAW -- to control sine waves for additive synthesis. Each slider controlled the volume of a sine wave pair, and the corresponding dial controlled the beat frequency created by that pair.  Frequencies were every third harmonic of a base 48Hz tone, from a low of 144Hz to a high of 1152Hz.

Every third harmonic drone

The first "every third harmonic drone" I uploaded was soon after I got my code to work, before I actually got to play with the instrument enough to get a feel for what I could do. It was also artificially short.

Now that I've played with it a bit more, here's a piece I'm happier with.


Every third harmonic drone revisited

This is a musical fragment that may grow into something ... or not.

It Started With The Bass

Please see the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykBF56bl3Hs . A detailed description can be found there.


Pseudononszhizophonic (Please see the video in the description!)

My attempt at composing using the traditional music notation software Musescore. My son Henry suggested the title, since he said it sounded like a generic medieval combat game soundtrack.

Legend Of Genericland

This is my older son Henry's composition in Musescore -- a theme he wrote for his younger brother Duane. He started with a melody on piano, but once he transcribed it into Musescore he was fascinated that he could compose a piece too complex for him to actually play.

Duane's Theme (by Henry Cahoon)

Trying to do microtonal stuff in Ardour using the Yoshimi plugin. Unhappy with the level of control I seem to have, but I'm not sure if that's me or my tools at this point. In any case, here's a little phrase.

A thing

I've had the plucked string part done for quite some time, but I really wanted to use sampled sound for a sustained instrument. I ended up sampling my own alto flute, and then I discovered how hard it was to get it to loop seamlessly. I ended up writing my own program to solve this and embed the looping info in the header. I must admit, after that long digression, I kind of rushed the flute sounds into this because I wanted to have something to upload. (But hey, listen to those long sustained flute notes; can you detect the loop point? I think my sample manipulation code was a success.)

I may do something else with this plucked string pattern later, but for now I'm moving on to my next project -- getting MIDI working with some alternate scales so I can move beyond the "paint-by-numbers" at my computer I've been doing so far and actually improvise a bit.

svn merge

The Shumann Resonance (also called "the resonant frequency of the planet") is being measured at a Russian observatory at Tomsk, whose website publishes a new graph every day. Unable to get the data directly from them, I've been downloading these graphs (frequency: http://sosrff.tsu.ru/?page_id=9 and amplitude: http://sosrff.tsu.ru/?page_id=12) and I wrote some Python code to extract the data from the graphs (a task complicated by their use of anti-aliasing).

Having extracted the data for a time period from 2017-05-08 to 2017-06-28, I was able to render this as sound.

This sonification is a very direct process: I raised the frequencies by 4 octaves to place them in the audible range and I rendered the change in the frequencies and amplitudes at 30000x faster than they actually occurred, contracting nearly two months of data into this two and a half minute piece.

Shumann Resonance At Tomsk

This is just me playing around with Csound's foscil opcode. I love the bell-like tones, but it's going to be hard to integrate this type of sound into just harmonic pieces.

I am pondering this deeply.

UFO sounds

Only http://soundcloud.com/megheery and myself were at the flute circle tonight. This was our final improvisation of the evening, totally freeform.

Minneapolis Flute Circle 2013-06-03 last jam

This is my solo, with http://soundcloud.com/megheery playing the Tibetan Singing Bowl.

Flute solo with Tibetan Singing Bowl (Minneapolis Flute Circle 2013-06-03)

This has become a dumping ground for every little experiment I've ever done, and stuff from my kids, too.

One day I'll produce some decent music, so stay tuned.

oF no orChestra

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