As a child, I had a very mild obsessive compulsion. I performed the same pattern in many small bodily movements (scratching, chewing, tensing etc.). For example:

If I had an itch on either of my legs, I would scratch my left leg first, and then my right leg twice, left again once, right again, left twice, then right once more, forming the pattern LRRLRLLR  (or 01101001, which is 105 in decimal). 

I have applied the pattern to many of the parameters of my quartet. The aim has been to use the pattern as the foundation for each movement, but not to stick to it too obviously, or let it make every decision. Just like the obsessive compulsion I had, it is always present, but not often noticeable.

String Quartet No. 105, Movement 4 - Chorale

String Quartet No. 105, Movement 3 - Nocturne

String Quartet No. 105, Movement 2 - Scherzo

String Quartet No. 105, Movement 1 - Cycles

This is a data sonification piece of the installation of the same name at the Tate Modern by the artist Olafur Eliasson. When I first saw the work, I was entranced by it and watched it for about half an hour. It's a piece made up of opposites: yellow and purple circles at opposite sides of the room turning to black and white straight lines meeting at the same point. 

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/eliasson-yellow-versus-purple-t11806

The piece is structured around my first experience of seeing the artwork: entering the room; being absorbed by the rotating and changing shapes; and then eventually snapping out of it. It was my first weekend living in London, I'd been alone and hadn't spoken for more than a day.

The central tone is an octave of the frequency of yellow light, stays still, getting brighter and darker, representing the shadow on the wall. The panning tones represent the purple reflection orbiting the room, being two sine tones, octaves of the frequencies of blue and red (summing to make purple). These become noisier as the reflection turns to a white line and meets the yellow shadow, now a black line. 

All of this occurs with changing frequency, as I timed the orbit of the artwork and found it ranged between 20 and 35 seconds.

The samples used are recordings of people in the room with Yellow Versus Purple. The opening includes the first loop, with the second loop in the ending.

Yellow Versus Purple

Happy Birthday Jamie Crooks

I built a Max patch that takes MIDI information and converts it to the centre frequency of a bandpass filter: in short, it lets you play a graphic EQ with a keyboard. On its own, the instrument is silent. However, it takes a live or recorded audio input and uses that as its ‘voice’. The patch then filters the audio at the frequencies corresponding to the pitches that are played. The output is panned such that high ‘notes’ are on the left and lows are on the right. The sound of the music played on the keyboard is crafted from the timbre of the underlying audio, so that the music and the audio create one timbre with pitch information contained within it.

- 'Chopin, YouTube’ is the Revolutionary Prelude with a wide filter and short envelope to reduce defined pitch and produce one energetically changing timbre. The audio used is a loop I made of 6 YouTube tutorials playing at once.

- ‘Satie, Drone’ is Gnossienne No 2 played with slightly narrower filter, an envelope with a slow attack and some sustain, and live input from a timbrally rich drone from a synthesizer. This creates a muddy sound where the pitch can be quite obscured, and due to harmonic gaps at the low end most of the lower ‘notes’ sound very similar.

- ‘Debussy, Train’ is Clair de Lune played with the narrowest possible filter and an envelope with an immediate attack decaying to silence. This is the most traditionally ‘musical’ performance – I chose the lack of sustain to make the pitches clearer. The audio voice is a field recording I made of some drunk football supporters boarding my train.

Schaeffer's Veil (Satie, Drone)

Schaeffer's Veil (Debussy, Train)

Schaeffer's Veil (Chopin, YouTube)

A sound collage created using a similar process to that of John Cage's Music of Changes.

Violin performed by the ever brilliant Jamie Philokyprou.

Luke Knott