Csound

From Complex Silence 12 - get the complete release and writeup here: http://www.archive.org/details/Complex_Silence_12

This piece uses binaural beats; headphones are recommended.

Artwok by Philip Wilkerson.

Ylem

Laptop running Pd, which is using csoundapi~ to execute a Csound instrument. This is controlled by an Arduino (the wooden box with the knobs and switches, which was made for me by Doug Seidel). The output is going through a reverb unit and then into an amp. Recorded live then normalized and minimally edited (fade-in at the beginning), no EQ or other processing.

The Csound instrument I'm playing is something I call the Difference Engine. Given a frequency and a frequency ratio, it generates eight oscillator tones: the input frequency, the ratio applied to the input frequency, and a series of difference and summation tones based on those two tones. There are actually two different instances of this, one controlled by the top three knobs and the other controlled by the bottom three knobs. For each set of three knobs, one sets the initial frequency and the other two set the numerator and denominator of the ratio.

So this is in essence a drone box based on an application of just intonation plus acoustic principles. The occasional glitchiness (which I dig) comes from tiny variations in the Arduino analog outputs. The sample/hold-type stuff happens when I change the ratio values rapidly.

Difference Engine Study 1

Another improvisation using the "Difference Engine" Csound instrument played with an Arduino hardware interface. Unlike the previous track, this one uses an external effects chain comprised of ring modulator, flanger, delay, and reverb.

See the notes for the Difference Engine Study 1 for more information about the hardware and software used.

Image found at http://www.picturesofspace.net/Exosphere.html.


Exospheric Disturbances

My first contribution to C. Reider's new Dystimbria netlabel/project and is the second track in that collection. Please go there, check it out, and consider contributing work of your own (but be sure to read the submission guidelines).

This was made in June 2011 by time-stretching an except from C. Reider's Dystimbria piece "A Strange Seed" and combining it with a Csound track and several layers of crickets (a single recording played back at different speeds). Edited together in Audacity.

http://dystimbria.cc

Disrhythmia (Dystimbria #2)

From Complex Silence 12, released February 2011. Full release at <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/Complex_Silence_12" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.archive.org/details/Complex_Silence_12</a>.
Binaurally-beating sine waves in just intonation. Made with Csound and blue.
Best listened with headphones and eyes closed. Dedicated to Eleh.



Gyre II (from "Complex Silence 12", 2011)

Made today with Csound and blue. Sine waves and binaural beats with an accompanying drone. 45 Hz and octaves thereof.

Hubble image of the Cat's Eye Nebula from http://www.google.com/earth/explore/showcase/hubble20th.html

Ansible Cathedral

Generative harmonic textures using pentatonic meta-slendro scales. Made with Csound/blue.

Scale for #1: 1/1 37/32 21/16 49/32 7/4 2/1
Scale for #2: 1/1 9/8 151/128 3/2 25/16 2/1

These are sustained tone clusters. Each tone is built from prime-numbered harmonics (1 through 13) where each harmonic is pulsed with a percussive envelope at a frequency that is proportional to the number of the harmonic. This gives each pitch its own rhythmic texture. In addition, the underlying "tempo" for each pitch is proportional to its pitch ratio. All combined, it produces an emergent polyrhythmic texture that is derived from the harmonic relationships between the  notes, and between the harmonic of the notes. Using different scales results in a different cyclic rhythmic texture. Each of the studies plays the cycle twice

Meta-slendro is a family of scales discovered by tuning theorist Erv Wilson and developed by composer Kraig Grady. More information about meta-slendro: http://www.anaphoria.com/wilsonintroMERU.html

Photo of Mt. Meru (Tanzania) found at http://richiki.blogspot.com/

Meta-Slendro Cloud Study 1

Meta-Slendro Cloud Study 2

Along similar lines to the Meta-Slendro Cloud Studies, but using a pelog-ish subset of Kraig Grady's Centaur scale. It's used in three different octaves, each octave running through the pattern at a half the speed of the one above it. To me it sounds kind of like a gamelan music box. Made with Csound/blue.

Here's the scale: 1/1 21/20 7/6 3/2 14/9 2/1
Which is a subset of the full Centaur scale: 1/1 21/20 9/8 7/6 5/4 4/3 7/5 3/2 14/9 5/3 7/4 15/8 2/1

Shadow puppet design by Nina Paley - <a href="http://blog.ninapaley.com/2009/05/05/shadow-puppet-shirt-designs" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://blog.ninapaley.com/2009/05/05/shadow-puppet-shirt-designs</a>/


Centaur-Pelog Cloud Study

A single chord tuned in just intonation, with each note's spectrum stretched using exponential curves to an interval of 21/20 (a "septimal chromatic semitone") and back again. The chord consist of the intervals 9/8 3/2 1/1 4/3 7/4 (in that order, low to high), where 1/1 is 240 Hz. I used a waveform made from the first 11 prime overtones. Some reverb was also applied. Made entirely in Csound with blue, converted from 96/24 WAV to 320kbps MP3 in Audacity.

Image: "Day 43 - Red Shift" by Brian J. Matis, licensed under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) from http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianjmatis/3275483167/

Drift Study III

From Complex Silence 4, released October 2009 on the Time Theory netlabel. It uses scales based on the golden ratio, and was made with Csound, blue, and Scala. The full release is available at http://www.archive.org/details/tmth06A. Cover image by Phillip Wilkerson.

Complex Silence 4 got a nice review on Disquiet in November 2009: http://disquiet.com/2009/11/03/dave-seidel-complex-silence/

Meridian Transit (from "Complex Silence 4", 2009)

This was made in Csound (with blue). It uses two mutually-exclusive just-intonation pentatonic scales from Kraig Grady's meta-slendro family, hocketed together like a hammered-dulcimer gamelan (or so I imagine).

Submitted as part of the ImprovFriday July 29-31, 2010 session.



Sumeru

Mark (aka Mystahr) at the Justnotnormal Netlabel has just released their second massive compilation, no-R-mal II, 71 tracks of experimental music organized into six sets (each of which is suitable for burning to a CD). Each CD has a theme; the first one is called Warm voices, and it includes a track of mine called Penumbral.

Penumbral started life several years ago as a piece called Passacagla & Fugue State and uses a “scale” I built from the set of pitches used in the La Monte Young sine wave installation called (deep breath) “The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119”. This is a revision of my earlier piece, with (hopefully) higher-quality sound and several other changes here and there.

The piece was not intended to imitate natural sounds, but it did result in some sounds that are somewhat reminiscent of the peepers and insects that can be heard in rural places. Listening to it this morning, it blended very well with the cricket sounds coming through the open windows of my living room.

Here is the track for streaming and/or downloading, but I encourage you to check out the rest of the No-R-mal II release — there’s a LOT of good music there.

Penumbral (from "no-R-mal II", 2010)

The inspiration for this track came from the opening of chapter 17 of William Gibson's 1986 novel Count Zero. More on the 29th Disquiet Junto project at http://disquiet.com/2012/07/19/disquiet0029-countzero/. More details on the Disquiet Junto at http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info.

Process:
- take a 30-second excerpt from a field recording I made of the Contoocook River in Peterborough, NH
- time-stretch it 7x in Paul's Extreme Stretch
- in Csound:
-- derive the spectral centroid[1] of each stereo track
-- use the centroid to control the pitch of a pair of sinewave oscillators
-- pass the oscillator tones through some reverb
-- combine the tones with the streatched water sound, crossfading so that the tones increase in amplitude as the water sound decreases
- convert to MP3 in Audacity

Image: "Animated loop of simulated hydrogen line spectra centroid jitter." found at http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/powerfrq.html, no copyright declared.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_centroid

Subsurface Tension [disquiet0029-countzero]

This track is a transformation, in honor of painter Clyfford Still, of a sample of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante, culled from this recording: http://archive.org/details/J.S.BachBrandenburgConcertoNo2

More on the Clyfford Still Museum at clyffordstillmuseum.org.

More on this 36th Disquiet Junto project at: http://disquiet.com/2012/09/06/disquiet0036-cstillconcerto/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at: http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/

-----

My process:
1.  I took an eight-second snippet of the source recording, starting at 4:33 (happy birthday, John Cage!) and going to the end of the track, then resampled it from 22.05K to 96K.
2. I stretched it to its current length using the Paulstretch effect in Audacity.
3. I duplicated the track and transposed it a minor seventh higher.
4. I duplicated the track again and transposed it a major seventh higher.

That's it other than normalization and transcoding to MP3. All steps performed in Audacity. Elapsed time: about 90 minutes.

I chose the intervals of major and minor seventh because these "dissonant" intervals are characteristic of much of the modernist music that was being written during the Abstract Expressionist period in visual art.

The image is the spectrum of a mono version of this piece. You can see the full image at http://www.flickr.com/photos/seidel/7949114640

Stillness [disquiet0036-cstillconcerto]

Quranic recitation and Tibetan Buddhist chant, combined and time-stretched with spectral processing.

Invocation

The source audio for this track is part three of the Kenneth Kirschner album June 5, 2012, which features Kirschner on piano and Tawnya Popoff on viola. The album was released in September 2012 on the shskh.com netlabel, where it is available for free download.

More on this 40th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/10/04/disquiet0040-kirschnerplus1/

More on Kenneth Kirschner at:

http://www.kennethkirschner.com/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/

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I wrote a Csound program to read in the original track and generate a "double" using a waveshaping process based on Csound's "chebyshevpoly" opcode. This opcode allows control over individual harmonics, and I used prime harmonics 2, 3, 7, 11, 13, 17. Each generated harmonic is controlled by an LFO whose frequency is inversely proportional to the  number of the harmonic; e.g., the second harmonic's LFO has a frequency of 1/2, or .5 Hz; the fifth harmonic used 1/5 or .2 Hz, etc. The shape of the waveform I used for the LFOs, combined with the very slow frequencies, results in an envelope that can sound percussive or plucked. This track also has a bit of reverb to help it somewhat match the ambience of the source track. Finally, I took the "double" and combined it with the original track in Audacity, and this piece is the result. The elapsed time of the project (including writing these notes) was about three hours.

The intent was to add new timbres with a contrasting texture (striated in comparison with the smoother surface of the source material), but to try to do it in such a way that the subtle and delicate beauty of Kirschner's piece was not obscured. I hope that the end result can be heard as an organic extension of the original piece.

The image is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hor and is a statue of the ancient Egyptian king Hor. On his head is the symbol "ka", an Eqyptian word that denotes vital essence, soul, or double.

Ka [disquiet0040-kirschnerplus1]

From January 2006, the title track of my first CD-R (Glass Museum) and netlabel (NetNewMusic) release. Original notes: http://mysterybear.net/article/14/sublimation. Netlabel release: http://www.archive.org/details/nnm007

Now available at http://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/sublimation in FLAC (lossless) format.

Sublimation (from "Sublimation", 2008)

A remix based on a 0.42-second sample (of a single phoneme from Noam Chomsky's speech) from Linguisms 1 by C. Reider, time-stretched 5000x and layered/cross-faded with sine oscillators driven by a running pitch analysis of the resulting drone.

Deep Structure (for C. Reider)

This is an entry for the Disquiet Junto project for March 7-11, 2013. 

The instructions were:
Step 1: Devise which three sine waves you will employ. They should be different from each other in some evident way.
Step 2: The track should open with just one of the sine waves.
Step 3: Add the second sine wave at 5 seconds.
Step 4: Add the third sine wave at 10 seconds.
Step 4: Only at 15 seconds should you begin to in any way manipulate any of the source waves.

I wrote a Csound program that generates three sine waves.
- The first tone is a 240Hz tone that sounds for the entire piece.
- The second tone is higher, starting at a ratio of 31/16 relative to the first tone (sharper than a major seventh, derived from the 31st harmonic).
- The third tone is lower, at a ratio of 16/31 relative to the first tone (the reciprocal of the second tone).
- After 15 seconds. the second tone starts gliding downwards in pitch until it reaches the ratio of 65/64 (flatter than a minor second, corresponding to the 65th harmonic).
- Also at 15 seconds, the third tone start gliding upward in pitch until it reaches the ratio of 64/65 (again, the reciprocal of the second tone).
- Elapsed time making the piece (not counting the time I thought about it before making it): about an hour.

Tl;dr: starts wide, gets narrow.

The sound file is just the output of running the Csound program, with no other manipulation. The source code is available at https://github.com/DaveSeidel/music-src/tree/master/disquiet0062-lifeofsine.

The image is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SierpinskiTriangle.PNG and is in the public domain.

More on this 60th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/03/07/disquiet0062-lifeofsine

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Triune [disquiet0062-lifeofsine]

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.

Csound

Dave Seidel