A small sample of some layers of modular synth, all recorded together in real time and running autonomously with minimal manual intervention. The Indian Marva scale provides the harmonic material. This will eventually be a component of a longer piece that will feature the Dvina (https://somasynths.com/dvina), with these layers as a foundation.

Bunch of different modules involved. First layer heard is the Spherical Waveform Navigator though Morpheus and QPAS filters, with the aux channel channel fed through the Erbe-Verb. The next layer is a combination of DPO and Loquelic Iteratas driven by Rene and a deliberately unsteady clock (Wogglebug+Tempi), processed through a number of things including (but not all in the same circuit): Triple Waveshaper, Resonant Equalizer, Tanh[3], Optomix,  DPLPG, and Mimeophon. Modulation sources include 0chd, Diode Chaos, and Pressure Points sequenced by Brains.

Untitled WIP snippet (Marva bed)

See https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0508-germane-shepard/48968

Image:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Globular_Cluster_M10.jpg

Disquiet Junto 0508

A Swarm of Shepards (disquiet0508)

Experimenting with the Shnth in a Hexany 1-3-5-7 scale:

  1/1 25/24 7/6 5/4 35/24 3/2 5/3 7/4

There is no octave as the Shnth has only eight keys/buttons. The opportunity to use tunings like this is one of the main reasons I got the Shnth, where all pitches are specified as integer ratios.

Shth (stereo) into two Digitech Grunge pedals, combined in a Repeater matrix mixer, then though a Moogerfooger ClusterFlux (back into stereo), then a Deluxe Memory Man. Ehdalh Moisturizer in the FX bus. Photo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seidel/11939149493/

Recorded in real time. No more than two pitches played at any one time, though with plenty of overlap due to a long decay time plus two layers of flanger resonance (and some reverb).

Image from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Octahedron.svg (Creative Commons).

Hexany Dyads

Nothing profound, just a quickie, inspired by my acquisition of the very cool Cascading Register from omiindustries (https://www.omiindustriies.com/cascading-register). That is what is generating the pitches in this generative piece. I used a scale I devised made from two six-note hexanies a whole tone apart (so twelve notes altogether.) 

---

For the gearheads, here follows a summary of most of the stuff that I used.

Pitch generation: Cascading Register, clocked by Wogglebug, output quantized by uTune and VC Octave Switch.

Main two voices: Tiptop Buchla 258t -> Optomix -> Nutone -> Prism
Addition voice: Loquelic Iteritas -> Electus Versio

Not going to enumerate the modulation sources, of which there were several.

Recorded in Reaper with the following plugins: ReaEQ, Gong Amp, Blackhole.

Fanfare (for the Common Tunicate)

First patch of 2023, exploring some of the possibilities of pitch dividers. Here they are used to create chords from a single oscillator. This is an open-ended generative patch, so this is really just a sample.

2023-01-01 VCV Rack Pitch Divider study

This is a study of a method of generating chords from a single sine wave. Each note of a random melody gets divided into 8 new tones, comprising the first 8 undertones of that note. Plus a bunch of other modulation and stuff to make it sound good (at least to my ears). This is a recording of one "performance" of the patch, and is not edited or post-processed in any way. Made in VCVRack; not my first patch, but my first decent patch starting from scratch.

Annotated video (of a different performance): https://youtu.be/pDN_Zy8sg4w

You can get this patch at https://patchstorage.com/stations-of-the-tide/ if you want to try it yourself, or make it into something else. Click the Run button on Clockd to get it started.

The title comes from Michael Swanwick's novel of the same name.

There's a sample from an earlier version of this patch at https://soundcloud.com/mysterybear/2023-01-01-vcv-rack-study

Stations of the Tide

This is a re-recording of my piece Hysteresis[1]. The original version was made using Meng Qi's WIngie2 resonator device as the sound source. In this version, I instead used my Implication Organ Csound instrument[2] as the sound source, but with the same pedals: dual Fat Fuzz Factories (one for each channel), Deluxe Memory Man with Hazarai, and Infinity looper. Like the original version, I recorded this as a single-take performance in my studio. I did some post-production (reverb, EQ, mastering) in Reaper.

More on this 579th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Memory Serves (The Assignment: https://disquiet.com/0579/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0579-memory-serves/

[1] https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/hysteresis
[2] https://github.com/DaveSeidel/music-src/tree/master/implication-organ

Hysteresis (Implication Organ version)[disquiet0579]

This is my entry for https://disquiet.com/2023/04/20/disquiet-junto-project-0590-concrete-roots/

I took a brief portion of a field recording I made several years ago of high tide in Provincetown Harbor (Provincetown, MA), and subjected it to a process inspired by Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room". I iteratively processed the sound through a convolution reverb using an impulse response (IR) from an empty concrete nuclear reactor hall, Each successive generation re-applies the reverb so that eventually we hear only the resonant frequencies in the space from which the IR was derived. This was a manual process, as I wanted to preserve the ever-increasing reverb tails, and also to control the reverb level to avoid digital distortion (which can be cool, but not what I was after).

When I assembled the segments into a single track, I decided to reverse the order so that the most highly-processed segment comes first, and the original recording is only heard at the end of the piece.

Made in Reaper using the Waves IRLive Stereo plugin. The IR is from the OpenAIR Project: https://www.openair.hosted.york.ac.uk/?page_id=626

I Am Tiding In A Concrete Room [disquiet0590]

Palimpsest is the new collaborative project of Laurie Amat (@amatworks) and Dave Seidel (@mysterybear). This piece was improvised in real time in Dave's studio in New Hampshire, and then mixed by Dave. Laurie: voice and electronics. Dave: electronics.

Palimpsest: Canticum I

Submission to 60x60 Death Mix: http://www.60x60.com/calls/.

For me, David Lynch's film Mulholland Drive is about the moment just before (or just after) death, where we enter a liminal, bardo state. This piece tries to express something about that unknowable moment.

Made entirely from an impulse recording made at York Minster in the UK, from the Open AIR Library project: http://www.openairlib.net/auralizationdb/content/york-minster

Process: I stretched the first five seconds of the IR recording to one minute using Paulstretch. Then I used Csound to recursively convolve the stretched sound with the original IR. The result comes from 17 generations of convolution, a procecure inspired by Alvin Lucier's piece "I Am Sitting in a Room." Finally, I layered in the original, unaltered sound at the beginning of the piece.

Mulholland Drive [60x60 Death Mix]

Just a little experimental drone to test out some oscillator sync ideas, using the DPO and XPO (and other stuff) in my recently reconfigured Make Noise Shared System (see photo), and my new reverb (Chase Bliss CXM 1978). Also a way of exercising my new subwoofer.

The three oscillators (DPO A, DPO B, and XPO) are synced to each other in a circular fashion (see below for more details). They were initially tuned to the same pitch but there is a small amount of slow pitch modulation applied to all three. There is also a bunch of other slow modulation affecting the filter (QPAS) and the delay (Mimeophon) as well as other aspects of the oscillators. All the modulation comes from an Instruo Ochd, which is the only non-Make Noise module in this system. Finally through the CXM 1978. No post-production other than fade-in/fade-out and normalization.

Warning: lots of deep lows. Use headphones or preferably good speakers (best with a subwoofer).

For the modular nerds, here's how the oscillators are connected together:
- XPO Spike output to DPO X-Lock (this syncs the DPO B oscillator to the XPO)
- DPO A oscillator in Sync mode (which syncs it to DPO oscillator B)
- DPO A oscillator triangle output to XPO sync input

In addition:
- DPO A sine output ring-modulated to DPO B sine output (using section 1 of modDemix)
- DPO B sine output ring-modulated to DPO A sine output (using section 2 of modDemix)

Sync Study

This is my interpretation of Catherine Christer Hennix's classic drone piece The Electric Harpsichord. Not a duplicate or recreation of the original, but an attempt to honor the essence of the piece as I understand it.

We don't have (to my knowledge) any score or written notes from Hennix herself, but we know from Henry Flynt that she used the North Indian Multani scale, tuned according to Alain Danielou's "Ragas of Northern Indian Music", and this is what I used here. (I refer to it as a scale and not as a raga because it is not used in a way that conforms with raga performance practice, although near the beginning you can hear the canonic ascending and descending forms of the raga.)

Hennix performed this piece on a retuned Yamaha electronic keyboard using the harpsichord setting, accompanied by sine wave generators. I am using two Meng Qi Wingie2 resonators (with custom firmware for the tuning), one for the bass and melodic figurations and one to resonate similarly to sympathetic strings. The little 7-note arpeggios/glissandi are implemented using MIDI, but it is all triggered by hand. This recording captures a single session, performed in real time. All of the sounds issue from the two WIngies, except for the underlying sine-wave drone, which is implemented in Csound.

A partial list of the other gear used includes Soma Labs Cosmos looper and Chase Bliss CXM 1978 reverb.

This track is also on Bandcamp: https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/track/homage-to-hennix-the-electric-harpsichord-reinterpreted

Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arabic_Alif.gif

Homage to Catherine Christer Hennix - The Electric Harpsichord (Redux)

This is an excerpt from an arbitrarily-long generative piece composed for an upcoming production of Samuel Beckett's "Play". Written in Csound, made out of sine waves (three groups of three).

Update: There is a very nice write-up on this piece by Marc Weidenbaum at http://disquiet.com/2015/05/17/sine-waves-for-samuel-beckett/.

Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:12crossings-rose-rhodonea-limacon-symmetrical-knot.svg (Public Domain).

Threefold Soliloquy

My entry for Disquiet Junto 178. In this project, we were presented with a field recording of bells in Berlin, and directed to "[r]ework the source audio in a manner that reinforces the melodic component of the bells. Beyond that sole instruction, the choices are up to you." 

Process:
1. take a 56-second excerpt from the source file (156s - 212s)
2. apply fade-in and fade out
3. stretch the track to four times its original length (using the Paulstretch effect in Audacity)
4. using Csound, convolve the track against an impulse response file made in an empty nuclear reactor hall (see below for details)
5. repeat step 4 four more times (five times in all)
6 convert to FLAC, add tags, upload

No additional sounds were added.

The impulse response I used is from the CC-licensed Open Acoustic Impulse Response (Open AIR) Library, specifically the "R1 Nuclear Reactor Hall" IR, made in empty hall of the first nuclear reactor in Stockholm. Link: http://www.openairlib.net/auralizationdb/content/r1-nuclear-reactor-hall

-----

More on this 178th Disquiet Junto project — “Emphasize the bells in an urban field recording” — at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/05/28/disquiet0178-sepulchrabells/

Source audio by Michael Raphael, aka Sepulchra, who runs the sound-library firm at rabbitearsaudio.com. Audio used with Raphael’s permission. Track originally posted at:

https://soundcloud.com/sepulchra/150526-marienkirche

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

Reactive Sepulchre [disquiet0178-sepulchrabells]

A quick example using the first of three Morphagene reels I made using existing recordings of IPA phonemes. This one uses the vowels reel. The Morphagene is being manipulated by various Wogglebug outputs. A bit of the way through, I add delay processing with Mimeophon. Reverb: CXM 1978.

The three reels (vowels, consonants, a diaphonemes) are available on Freesound: https://freesound.org/people/DaveSeidel/packs/43523/

IPA Vowels Morphagene Reel example

Demo of current setup, prepping for Wire Factory (Lowell, MA) show on June 7. The central devices are the Ciat-Lonbarde Clicker and the Ciat-Lonbarde Peterlin. There is some serious low-frequency content.

Multinoise in-progress demo

Part 1 of a two part generative piece written in Csound.

For more information, and to download the entire album, please visit https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/imaginary-harmony.

Imaginary Harmony - Part 1

Single-take improv using Nebulophone, Freq Box, Ring Modulator, Cluster Flux, DEP-2b, Deluxe Memory Man w/ Hazarai, Stereo Panneur, Boomerang III. Recorded direct from mixer to Zoom H5. Normalized and converted to MP3 in Audacity. No other post-processing, no edits. 

Image credit: By NASA, NOAO, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHorsehead-Hubble.jpg

Dark Nebula

This is the second track of the release "Prism, Mirror, Lens". For more information and downloads, please visit https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/prism-mirror-lens

The x-ray crystallography image that accompanies this release was created by Dr. Thomas White / Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY and is used by kind permission.

Buddha Machine 3 (Chang Fang 禅房) with two drones and additional processing. Played and recorded in real time.

Sound sources:
- melody: Buddha Machine 3 (Chang Fang 禅房)
- high drone: Nebulophone through DEP-2b
- low drone: Chaos NAND Synth though Nose Swash

Processing loop: Ring Modulator, MuRF, ClusterFlux, Deluxe Memory Man with Hazarai, Boomerang III, Ekdahl Moisturizer.

Recorded direct from mixer to Zoom H6. Normalized and EQ'd in Audacity, no edits.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reclining_Buddha_at_cave_no._26.jpg

Under the dream temple

Disquiet Junto Project 0226: Bucky Ball
Compose music for a fictional greatest-hits collection of the electronic music of R. Buckminster Fuller.

More on the project here: http://disquiet.com/0226/

I was inspired by Tom Johnson's piece The Chord Catalogue (which consists of all possible chords in a single octave, played on a keyboard). This is a similar concept, but applied to a six-note 1-3-5-7 hexany scale in just intonation and using only the three-note chords. My reasoning was that, had Bucky been a composer, his mathematical and geometrical inclinations might have led him down a similar path. (Maybe he would have been more of a modernist than a minimalist, given his era, but he did overlap with minimalism.)

Coded and rendered it in Csound, no post-processing.

Image credit: The original uploader was Cyp at English Wikipedia. Later versions were uploaded by Fropuff at en.wikipedia. (Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons. Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AOctahedron.jpg

The 1-3-5-7 Hexany Chord Catalogue (The 35 three-note chords possible in one octave) [disquiet0226]

My set from the first night of Providence Y2K International Live Looping Festival (see http://www.pvdloop.org), at the AS220 main space, September 30, 2016. Live recording, includes a few sounds made by people in the vicinity of the recording device.

I was playing electric bass with vibrator, socket wrench slide, and transducer. Setup included Zvex Fat Fuzz Factory, volume pedal, Moogerfooger ClusterFlux, E-H Deluxe Memory Man, Boomerang III, 4ms Stereo Panneur.

Most of this piece was derived from the first four notes of Angelo Badalamenti's Love Theme from "Twin Peaks".

Laura Palmer Eldritch (PVDLoopFest 2016)

An augmented sonification of Kyle Gann's Anatomy of an Octave (the extant condensed version with 580 pitches) in the form of a catalog piece. All 580 ratios are played against a 240Hz base pitch, one at a time from low to high with a duration of 7 seconds each, with additional chord tones derived from the frequencies (combination tones, Pythagorean means, etc.) using my Implication Organ instrument in Csound. I recommend downloading before listening to get the highest quality sound.

This piece is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=697lo5twu5A

Thanks to Kyle for his work, and for giving me the go-ahead to publish this piece and approving the title.

For more information about the list of ratios, see Kyle's excellent book The Arithmetic of Listening (https://www.amazon.com/Arithmetic-Listening-History-Impractical-Musician/dp/0252084411). Also, listen to his music!

More on the Implication Organ: https://github.com/DaveSeidel/music-src/tree/master/implication-organ

I had intended to publish this on Bandcamp, but the file exceeds their upload limits. But you can consider supporting me by buying one of my other releases at https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/

Image: The Dove, No. 14 by Hilma af Klint, retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:5_hilma_af_klint,_the_dove_no_14,_1915.jpg

Gann's Anatomy

Live performance by David D. McIntire (baritone saxophone, bass clarinet), Michael Miller (bass clarinet, zwoom) and Dave Seidel (electronics) at Missouri Western State University, March 4, 2020.

This performance is a collaboration created by McIntire and Miller improvising with my piece Involution 2 (with some live tweaking of the electronics). This was our first performance as an ensemble, and we had no rehearsals. We had a great time, and I hope that we (or some other assemblage) can do this again sometime, hence the designation as "#1".

Involution symbol found at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cowie%27s_Printer%27s_Pocket-Book_and_Manual/Mathematical,_Algebraical,_and_Geometrical_Characters

(w)In(d)volution #1

This is a very brief demo of the Risset Harmonic Oscillator instrument I made for the Qu-Bit Nebulae v2 synthesizer module to give some idea of what it sounds like. Recorded direct, no effects.

Guide (the timings may not be exact, bt they should be in a right ballpark):

0:00-0.12: Fade in using amplitude control; triangle wave, minimum offset (full CCW)

0:13-0:36: Offset at about 35%, more arpeggio effect

0:37-1:17: Increasing the offset, eventually to max (full CW), then back to 35%

1:18-1:49: Start morphing through the waveforms, full CCW to full CW

1:50-2:04: Stay on Fibonacci wave (full CW) for a bit

2:05-2:28: Moving CCW, stopping very briefly at each waveform (approximately), ending up at triangle and staying there

2:29-2:40 : Start panning , going up to about 30%

2:41-3:16 Increase panning speed in increments, eventually reaching max (full CW)

3:17-end: Back to about 305 panning speed, then fade out using amplitude control

For more information, see Github:
https://github.com/DaveSeidel/music-src/tree/master/Nebulae/instr/Risset_Harmonic_Oscillator

Patchstorage:
https://patchstorage.com/risset-harmonic-oscillator/

DEMO: Risset Harmonic Oscillator (Nebulae instrument)

A study in abstract microtonal sonorities. Please listen on headphones or good speakers. As Eleh says, volume reveals detail.

Dedicated to Kraig Grady.

Harmonics: modulation between four six-note hexanies with common tones, all derived from the same twenty-note eikosany.

Sonics: modular synth, delay and looping pedals, reverb.

Ophanim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophanim

Image: detail from Jakob Böhme's "Theosophia revelata" (1730), found at https://speciesbarocus.tumblr.com/post/17943811038/jakob-b%C3%B6hme-theosophia-revelata-1730-detail (complete work at https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24514421M/Theosophia_revelata_das_ist_Alle_g%c3%b6ttliche_Schriften).

Ophanim

Ophanim Study

or, "Thirty Way of looking at an Eikosany" (apologies to Wallace Stevens)

A sequence of 30 unique but related six-note chords in a microtonal tuning. Each of the six notes is doubled with octave displacements, so there are actually twelve tones in each chord.

For tuning geeks: these chords comprise the complete set of hexanies contained within a 1-3-5-7-11-13 eikosany, ordered such that each chord has at least one tone in common with the next chord in sequence.

Made in Csound using artisanal sine waves.

Hexany Cycle

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

Infinity Study

Track 2 from "Sing Men and Women!" by Alan Morse Davies and mysterybear, on the At Sea netlabel.

To stream and/or download the entire release, please visit http://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/sing-men-and-women.

Download and/or Buy

Sing Woman (with Alan Morse Davies) from "Sing Men and Women!", 2013

A bit over three hours of slowly shifting chords, modulating between sonorities, part 1 of 6. This was originally conceived as a single VERY long track, but that proved to be impractical given Bandcamp's limits on file size. Perhaps it's better this way. I hope this music can provide some measure of peace and serenity in the midst of this long period of isolation, worry, and tragedy.

Download the entire piece (free) at https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/the-ophanim-cycles

An early prototype of this piece: https://soundcloud.com/mysterybear/ophanim

Another way of seeing/hearing the underlying chord sequence used in this piece: https://soundcloud.com/mysterybear/hexany-cycle

The Ophanim Cycles

Download

Ophanim Cycle 1

The Ophanim Choirs began as a follow up to the The Ophanim Cycles (https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/the-ophanim-cycles). Where the Cycles are built up from single tones accumulating in layered loopers. the Choirs are built from accumulating three-note chords, making denser textures. After completing the Choirs (which I may eventually release), I created this track as an experiment, taking all six Choir tracks and combining them into a single track where they play simultaneously (with some spatial separation).

So herewith is my year-end gift to all. It may be somewhat sonically excessive, but as Jean Cocteau said, "A little too much is just enough for me." 2020 was a bit much, after all.

The Ophanim Choirs

The Ophanim Choirs (2020 In Memoriam)

Experimental electronic music, mostly in the drone category. This is where I put live sets, one-offs, experiments, and excerpts from longer releases.

CD: "~60 Hz" on Irritable Hedgehog - http://recordings.irritablehedgehog.com/album/dave-seidel-60-hz

All releases, including netlabel items: 
http://mysterybear.net/music

https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/

Sorry, SC won't let me follow any more people, so don't feel slighted if I don't follow you back.

Popular tracks by Dave Seidel