All sounds originate from a classic recording of a Balinese gamelan orchestra. Granular synthesis is used to pick out clouds and grains of source sound from the recording, which are then molded into various forms by signal processing. Vocoded noise, resonators and filters are the main digital effects used to shape the sounds.

Refraction Redux

The glitch-type aesthetic of this track was established using granular synthesis. Larger grain sizes are used to achieve a glitch-like texture, instead of the cloud-like textures normally resulting from granular synthesis.

The primary audio source material used for this track is the original studio recording of "Troy" by Sinead O'Connor, from her debut album "The Lion and the Cobra". Also utilized as source material is a solo recording of a Sufi flute.  

 The rich presence of the sounds here and the varying character of the track's changes from section to section, both stem from the originality, strength, harmonic power and resonance contained within Sinead's recording of "Troy". 

The title, "Nimbus of Yelena", refers to its source. A nimbus is like a halo or aura, and something akin to Sinead's sonic aura emerges throughout the misty amalgams of audio grains which blend into the glitchy bricolage featured here. 'Yelena" is another name for 'Helen', a.k.a. Helen of Troy.

Besides the drum loop, all sounds in this track originate from Sinead's "Troy" and the Sufi flute recording.



Nimbus Of Yelena

Here's a little medley mix of a few music examples I did for EarSketch, utilizing the power and elegance of recursion and self-similarity to computationally remix some loops from Young Guru and Richard Devine.

http://earsketch.gatech.edu

Towers of Hanoi

Gates Pass At First Light

Super Soul

minúte triptych

New Machine

I Ching or "Book of Changes" is an ancient Chinese text and an organizational structure that mathematically corresponds to both the genetic language of DNA and the binary language of modern computing. Each of its 64 symbols is known as a 'hexagram' - a six-bit binary number which may also be interpreted as a pair of 'trigrams' containing three bits each.

   This brief musical track "Astral Pagoda" is an example of the musical potential encoded within a particular pattern of the I Ching. The melodies and rhythms of all musical-parts* were established by converting a particular ordering of I Ching hexagrams into musical elements: a sequence of yins & yangs mapped directly into a list of musical attacks & rests, while also mapped by groups of three in order to select tones from the eight steps of a musical scale**. 

There is a 2000+ year-old partition of the I Ching into eight sequences of eight hexagrams each, called the 'houses' or 'mansions' of the I Ching. Since a sequence of eight hexagrams may be viewed as a sequence of 48 bits, the melody, counter-melody, bassline and rhythm of each of the eight six-bar sections of music were generated by interpreting each of these distinct bit sequences according to a single set of rules defining how to map a sequence of 48 bits into music. In the track, a cymbal crash is heard every six bars, signaling the start of a new house with its corresponding bit-sequence determining its distinctive musical content. Since the mapping is kept exactly the same while the sequence of 48 bits changes with each house, what we hear as the music progresses from section to section is a direct musical interpretation of an elemental pattern whose form was encoded over 2000 years ago. No subsequent modifications were made. Thus we experience this ancient sequence of yin and yang unfolding in musical time as an ordering of notes & rests maneuvering about the tones of a musical scale. It's interesting to consider that ours is only one out of any number of possible musical interpretations, merely the one derived via our chosen mapping. Who knows what further musics might be there just waiting in potential, abiding patiently for some chance to be revealed!

(* all music except the drum loop was generated by a mapping from the I Ching pattern to musical elements)

(** When a binary sequence is grouped into packets of three, it forms a shorter sequence of three-bit values with eight possibilities for each value. These eight value-types may correspond to the eight tones of a full diatonic scale from tonic to octave, denoting a particular musical interpretation of the eight trigrams of the I Ching.)

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