Name: Drone - IV - 1377971544 by Michael Gogins
Duration: 7 min
Description: This piece was composed on my Samsung Galaxy S4 telephone, using the Csound6 app for Android. This recording of the piece was made on my laptop because the telephone struggles with both rendering to audio, and writing to soundfile. The piece is interactive, and gives the performer some control over the timbres of the rich sounds in the piece.

This piece was composed on my Samsung Galaxy S4 telephone, using the Csound6 app for Android. This recording of the piece was made on my laptop because the telephone struggles with both rendering to audio, and writing to soundfile. The piece is interactive, and gives the performer some control over the timbres of the rich sounds in the piece.

Drone - IV - 1377971544

Night-shining clouds, seldom seen, happening in late Summer evenings, when the angle of the earth allows the reflected sun rays to make these clouds visible. They are possibly made up of ice crystals high up in the atmosphere, beyond the ordinary clouds. Just as they indicate the radiance of a hidden sun, the sonic nebulae in this piece reflects the various shades of an audio source that is finally revealed at the work’s end.

Noctilucent Clouds (master)

Examples of a few custom wavetables. They are created algorithmically within Csound. The first section features harmonic & inharmonic partial wavetables, the second uses a single wavetable derived from noise (random numbers). With both sections there are no filters used or any modifications except some reverb - it's straight wavetable playback. There is slow random modulation of the fundamental pitch on some of the noise table notes, via the instr, but all other amp/freq mod that can be heard are inherently generated by the tables.

Custom wavetables example (see description)

Harrier

Merganser

Oriole

Live performance of Penance at New River Studios 2 Nov 2016.

Algorithmically generated samples and real-time signal processing.

Penance

The opening track from Glassworks by Philip Glass rendered in Csound.

Opening by Philip Glass rendered in Csound

This is, believe it or not, a variation on Mozart's musical dice game of 1787, only composed by random numbers of repetitions of each bar on six separate tracks as in Terry Riley's "In C", plus on top of that I have applied a diatonic 7th chord harmony with random (but directed) root progressions and random modulations generated using the new Scale class in my CsoundAC library for algorithmic composition using Csound. All sounds are synthesized by Csound. The music theory behind the software was inspired by Dmitri Tymoczko and elaborated by myself.

Cellular version 3

I've recently discovered (at long last) the music of Danish composer Per Nørgård. He developed a compositional techniques based on what he called the "infinity series", which is a simple formula for developing a series of numbers based on an interval such as a minor second. The series takes the initial interval and then slowly expands upon it both upwards and downwards in pitch, getting broader in scope as it progresses. This idea can be used to generate melodies, rhythms, or other aspect of a composition.

I decided to try playing around with this, but applying it to microtonal intervals, using Csound and a Python script to generate the Csound score according to the series. I ended up with this brief study, which takes the first 256 terms of the series and applies it to three of my favorite intervals simultaneously:
 - 9/8 (major whole tone from the 9th harmonic)
 - 11/8 (unidecimal tritone,from the 11th harmonic)
 - 7/4 (septimal minor seventh, from the 7th harmonic)

The starting tone (240 Hz) plays throughout the piece as the other notes unfold above and below it. I used sine waves processed with a touch of tanh distortion to add a slight amount of harmonic content.

Csound and Python source code: https://github.com/DaveSeidel/music-src/tree/master/infinity-study

References:
 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_N%C3%B8rg%C3%A5rd
 - https://web.archive.org/web/20071010091253/http://www.pernoergaard.dk/eng/strukturer/uendelig/uindhold.html

Drone - IV - 1377971544

Michael Gogins

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