"F"
Pete Kellock

PROGRAM NOTE
This is a piece I created while doing my PhD in electronic music in 1979/80. The core concept is a fanning out from the note F natural, particularly a low 88Hz F (concert Pitch A440 is the fifth harmonic of this low F).

The fanning takes place along three dimensions: harmonics, subharmonics and detuning, the last of which can be viewed as a spreading out of fixed pitches in the frequency domain. These processes play out gradually through 8 sections leading up to the climax, each of which is 0.88 the duration of the previous one; there follows a recapitulatory ninth section.

Thus the first section comprises only F naturals, playing with the open octaves across 10 octaves across most of our hearing range, from 88Hz to about 9KHz (2^10 * 88). The second section introduces two new notes (pitch classes), C natural and B flat, those being the closest pitches to the third harmonic and subharmonic. The third section adds two more notes close to fifth harmonic and subharmonic, namely A natural and D flat, the fourth section adds E flat and G natural and so on. Soon all pitches are including, but the process continues on towards the endpoint of all three fanning processes: the inclusion of all frequencies, namely noise.

The harmonic/subharmonic fanning is not intended as an acoustic process to be followed literally. Rather I use it as the underlying structure for a musical interpretation, a scheme in which more and more notes are "allowed", moving the sound from stark octaves gradually through consonance to dissonance and finally noise. So for example in the third section, the set of available pitches comprises an F major triad and the Bb minor triad, but the set is also treated as a 5-note scale: F-A-Bb-C-Db, a subset of Bb harmonic minor. I've always found some truth in the idea that the history of Western music (I can't say for other cultures) is a kind of climbing of the harmonic series, from the simplest pitch ratios which generally the most consonant intervals, to increasingly complex ratios and dissonant intervals: from the octave (2:1), through fifths (3:2), thirds (5:4 and 6:5) and so on to semitones (approx 17:16) and ultimately noise in which all possible ratios are represented within the continuum of noise.

The work was created in the analogue electronic music studio of Aberdeen University, mainly using a Synthi-100 and two tape machines, an 8-track and a 4-track. In process such as the pitch fanning I wanted to have hundreds, if not thousands of pitches, blurring the distinction between a set of discrete pitches and narrowband noise. The only way to achieve this was tape bouncing: I’d record 8 individual tracks and bounce them down to one; four of these on the 4-track would give me 32 tracks, which I’d then bounce back to a single track on the 8-track, getting me up to 256 tracks. In a few places I went to another generation of 4, giving me 1024 tracks. Painstaking doesn’t begin to describe it: the first chord alone took me a month to complete, and it’s purely a set of F naturals …albeit with a little use of non-sine timbres which means other frequencies are present; sines alone would have been too limiting. As I created other the sections I found shortcuts allowing me to work faster, but still it was a pretty arduous, drawn-out process.

This bouncing also introduced noise and other analog artefacts. In 2012 I did some remastering to reduce this a bit, sacrificing some high frequency energy in the process. Creating this work today with digital audio would be so much easier, and would allow closer more-rigorous adherence to the formal scheme than I found possible in 1980. The sonic result would also be much cleaner and crisper. But listening back on this in 2021 I’m surprised how much of the dramatic power of the work manages to shine through. And the piece still sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard.

F (1980)

Steel Breeze
Pete Kellock

PLEASE LISTEN ON HEADPHONES, HI-FI OR OTHER DECENT SOUND SYSTEM. The piece has a wide dynamic range – for example the first couple of minutes is extremely quiet. On typical PC speakers you won't even hear half of it. 

PROGRAM NOTE
This is a piece I created in 1980-82 while completing my PhD in electronic music. It’s built from a handful of core ideas: a rising semitone, F# -> G, first extended to 4 notes with a rising major 7th C# -> C, then combined with a transposition of this figure (A -> Bb -> E -> Eb) to form the tone-semitone “octatonic” scale F# - G - A - Bb - C - C# - Eb – E. There are three possible transpositions of this scale, and the pitch material for the work comes from the interplay between these scales. 

Other elements include...
  -	Extensive use of pitch slides which I executed on the Glissboard (see below). The fluidity of these stands in stark contrast to sharply percussive sounds quantized to a rigid, robotic timing grid.
  -	A process of “tearing apart” the sound using amplitude modulation, transforming quasi-orchestral harmonic textures into highly electronic noise. This can be heard clearly in the section around 4’ to 7’ in the work 

The work was created in the analogue electronic music studio of Aberdeen University, using a Synthi-100, a Korg PS3100 and an 8-track tape machine. I also used 3 controllers which I developed and built as part of my PhD:
-	A 2-octave keyboard I dubbed the “Glissboard” which include a discrete-pitch zone at the front (based on piano keyboard layout) and a continuous-pitch zone at the rear where I was able to perform vibratos and pitch glides.
-	A simple breath controller I built based on blowing down a plastic pipe onto a microphone and extracting the envelope of the resulting noise. A detail of the design was that to reduce sensitivity to other sound, I used two mics wired in antiphase to do noise cancellation; the breath was directed onto one mic, while extraneous sounds would reach both mics and be cancelled.
-	A simple array of five sliders configured at angles so that I could control them all with the fingers of my left hand while using my right hand on the Glissboard.

The Glissboard was similar in many ways to ROLI’s Seaboard released about 30 years later, especially the 2-octave Seaboard Block. And the combination of this plus breath controller is central to what I’m doing 40 years later (as of 2021) combining these in the “Poikilophone”. The technology has improved greatly since the 1980s, becoming digital instead of analog, so the Seaboards and the Poikilophone are undoubtedly more powerful. But the basic configuration is similar, and moments in this work sound somewhat akin to demos of Poik I’ve created in 2021:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jsl30HMc3yU&list=PLlNyzLPxRgSXfNF117OqenEUb2-7cWx6r&index=1

The highly-quantized robotic-sounding elements of the piece, which start around 9’ and run all the way to the climax, also required some technical tricks: gating envelopes to get the timing exact (I can’t play that accurately!), and the use of a monophonic sequencer (an OSC Spider) multitracked with its clock driven from a click track. I recall days spent pushing the available tech to the edges of what it could do, endless punch-ins as I attempted to get everything right, with failures (in the tech or my performance) outnumbering good takes perhaps ten to one. But I persevered, and in the end got pretty much the effect I wanted, of tight polyphonic sequencing. 

Like “F”, the other major work I created during my PhD, the audio quality leaves much to be desired: tape hiss, limited high frequency response, synth sounds that sound crude by today’s standards, and other issues. Nevertheless, I think the musical intent survives and – to my ears at least - the work sounds unique, quite unlike anything I’ve heard before or since.

Steel Breeze (1982)

Exozoologica
Pete Kellock

Acousmatic work for rainforest birds, cicadas, Chinese flutes, Ukrainian violin, Convolvotrix, and a tiny fragment of Stravinsky.

PLEASE LISTEN ON HEADPHONES, HI-FI OR OTHER DECENT SOUND SYSTEM. The piece has a wide dynamic and frequency range; on typical PC speakers you won't even hear half of it.

PROGRAM NOTE
Exozoologica [noun]: animal life of another planet.

I don’t usually experience music in terms of images and this isn't “program music”. But as I wrote the piece, parts of it carried me to a specific place: an eerie rainforest on some other planet, its soundworld a sort of Darwinian orchestra where survival and musical sonority are tightly intertwined... alien birdcalls, tritone howls, cicadas shimmering in E minor, mutant drums, the sudden metallic hiss of some nightmarish predator...

The work was motivated by a slightly deranged challenge that had bugged me for decades: try to create a piece with the expressiveness, subtlety, drama and structural integrity of a major symphonic work, but do it using a sonic language like nothing I’ve heard before.

Did I succeed? Let me know what you think: petekellock@gmail.com.

A central principle is that most of the sounds derive from two sources - a recording of jungle life plus a Chinese flute phrase say, or fragments of drum loops and a folk violin - crossbred using techniques such as convolution and vocoding. The convolution creates a highly reverberant ambience (akin to the acoustic of big-tree forests) which permeates the work.

Structurally the piece is held together by a process of continuous development: motifs appear, interlock, mutate, compete and perhaps eventually reach some kind of peace (or at least accommodation) with each other. In this work, these feel like survival strategies.

NOTE ON THIS MIX
Release Mix 12, created 2013-12-06
1.3 : 1 multipression, no bass boost
44.1 KHz / 24bit (at least the source file I uploaded is 44.1KHz / 24 bit).

(c) 2013 Pete Kellock 

Exozoologica (2013)

One of the tracks I co-wrote/recorded with Leigh Saunter, Bill Speckart and others back in 1994. The complete album is available on iTunes, Spotify and elsewhere.

Gecko Sushi 09 - Cell To Cell (1994)

Gecko Sushi 11 - Sweetest Slice (1994)

One of the tracks I created for a poetry + music event called "Free Verse" in Singapore, 1991.  Leigh Saunter and I collaborated on the music for the event under the name Persuasian.

Green (from Free Verse, 1991)

"Reality and War" from Tunnels, a multimedia show a few of us created and staged at the Singapore Arts Festival in 1992. Leigh Saunter and I created the music; this track was mostly my work.

Reality & War (from Tunnels, 1993)

Written and performed by Persuasian (Leigh Saunter, Victor Ng and me) circa 1990. We used two Zyklus MPS interactive sequencers in the live performance. Or was it three?

Persuasian: On The Rite (live, 1990)

Persuasian: In The Dark

Music written for Vaclav Havel's play "The Memorandum" - a black comedy about insane bureaucracy.
Written and performed by Persuasian (Leigh Saunter, Victor Ng and me) circa 1990.
Used at least one Zyklus MPS.

Persuasian - The Memorandum

This is a studio version of a work I created for the "time:crystals" event held in Singapore in April 2019. Robert Casteels, Dirk Stromberg and I performed it live using Dirk's "Line Segments" controller/sculpture and TouchOSC on iPad.
All the major musical elements in this - harmony, rhythm, melody and melodic expression - are algorithmically-generated by code I wrote in Max for Live. In this version the only things I controlled manually are the mix (what tracks play when and their level), the timing of transitions between the sections of the piece, and triggering of a few of the non-rhythmic "atmospheric" sounds. 
The uploaded file is STUDIO VERSION vEc 2019 - 08 - 08 24bit.

Time Snow (2019)

I love wild places barely touched by human beings: the Australian desert, Patagonia, the canyon country of Utah, the New Guinea highlands, wild coastlines and mountaintops everywhere...  
When I write electronic music, the same thing seems to happen: I find myself drawn to a kind of no-man’s land, one apparently not much visited by composers. This land borders on some known territory - the avant-garde, rock, ambient and even parts of the mainstream classical tradition (Wagner? Bartok?) - but doesn't quite fit any of those labels. 
At least that's how my music sounds to me. How does it sound to you? I'm curious how others hear my music, so drop me a note: petekellock@gmail.com

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