Music by Dave Seidel
Gyre
Posted 25 January 2010, 11:51
I’ve long been fascinated by the psychoacoustic phenomena known as binaural beats, and I have employed this effect in previous pieces, particularly The Gemini Nebula. I wanted to make another piece where binaural beats were integral to the music, and the result is Gyre.
Gyre consists of a single 14-note chord whose pitches are introduced in high-to-low order and eventually removed in the reverse order. I used La Monte Young’s Magic Opening Chord, which I have worked with previously. Each tone is produced using two sine waves: one tuned very slightly higher than the target pitch and the other tuned slightly lower, panned to opposite stereo channels. The difference in pitch between any given pair of tones ranges from a bit over 4 Hz to a bit over 11 Hz. These are all within the range that causes binaural beating to occur in the listener’s perception.
The trick here is that I made the beating proportional to the pitch. In other words, the highest note beats at the fastest rate, and the beating is slower with successively lower pitches. The chord is tuned in just intonation, meaning that each interval can be expressed as a rational number (e.g., 3/2, which a perfect fifth). Each tone beats at its own rate which is similarly related to the beats of the other pitches. Thus, as the chord is built, the listener perceives a progressively complex structure of interlocking rhythms. In fact there are two layers of rhythm: one from the binaural beating, and the other from the tonal relationships of the notes in the chord.
The piece is buiilt from nothing but sine waves, with no effects or additional processing. I made it with blue and Csound. You can get the blue project file here.
IMPORTANT: To get the full benefit of the binaural beating, listen to this with headphones. It will also work with speakers, but in that case do your best to place yourself as closely as possible to the center of the stereo field.
Gyre by mysterybear (click the down-arrow to download the track)
Gyre by Dave Seidel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Tags
binaural beats, drones, just intonation, la monte young
Leather To Spend
Posted 3 January 2010, 17:40
When my late friend Jon Gams and I met, he was looking for someone with whom he could collaborate on music. We started with songs that he had already written, but soon started writing new things together. In those days (1975-1978) before we moved to NYC and started a band, we did everything on acoustic guitars, sometimes with piano.
We were always particularly happy with this piece, especially because of the way it came about. As far as I can remember, it was late fall/early winter in 1976. Jon and I had each come up with a sequence of simple arpeggiated chords. His was in E, mine was in A; his was in 2/4 with triplets, mine was in 6/8. As an experiment, we put the two together and were amazed to find that they went together perfectly — not a single note needed to be changed. We went on to add another section based on an ostinato that I wrote with a melody that he wrote, and also found other ways to combine some of the different elements. The end result was typical of a style we developed based on combining parts with different phrase lengths and meters. Like a number of other musicians at the time, we were incorporating the influence of minimalism. (Some aspects of what we were doing are similar to what was later referred to as totalism.)
This arrangement for two pianos is almost identical to the original version for two guitars, with a bit added from a later version that included piano. The piano in the right channel corresponds to Jon’s guitar part; the left channel corresponds to mine. I will eventually make a score available, once I can find a reasonable way to present it.
The melody in the middle section has a lyric (written by Jon, who always wrote the words) that goes as follows:
Love me oh love me my friend
Stripped down with feelings to spare
I’ve got some leather to spend
Love me oh love me my friend
(There are additional lines that go along with these in a call-and-response manner, but I don’t remember them. If someone else has those words, please let me know!)
Technical notes: I used Noteworthy Composer to notate the piece and export it as MIDI; used Reaper to render it to a sound file using Soeren Bovbjerg’s Steinway Grand Piano v1.2 soundfont; converted from 96/24 to 44.1/16 using r8brain, then finally exported to MP3 using Audacity.
Leather To Spend (click the down arrow to download)
Copyright 1976, 2010 by Jon Gams & Dave Seidel, some rights reserved.
Leather To Spend by Jon Gams & Dave Seidel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Tags
chamber music, jon gams, piano
Elegy, for Jon
Posted 18 November 2009, 19:40
Jon Gams, my closest friend (aside from my wife) for the past 34 years, passed away 11 days ago. It was a complete shock — he got the flu, and he was gone. He was one month short of his 58th birthday.
Jon and I met in 1975, when I was 17 and he was 24, in Great Barrington, MA where I was going to college and he was living. He was looking for someone to play guitar with. We were musical partners, friends and brothers from our first meeting. We had a band in NYC called People Falling from the late ’70’s through the ’80’s and continued to collaborate well into the ’90’s. In the past few years we continued to work together sporadically, but we were too busy with other things and lived too far apart to be productive, a reality that we were finally able to acknowledge to each other only this past September.
(You can hear the last completed piece that we wrote and recorded together, called “Fascists Call Beauty A Joke”, using the music player on the front page of this site, or you can download it. It was published on a CD that accompanied issue #5 of Lingo, the arts magazine that Jon edited and published in the ’90’s.)
“Elegy, for Jon” is a variant of “Solar Midnight”, the second track of my Complex Silence 4 release. I had wanted to make a version that was tuned in just intonation; the original uses an “irrational” tuning based on the Golden Ratio. It is a very slow three-voice mensuration canon in a simple scale, first played at the same starting pitch and then with three different starting pitches.
As I worked on this rearrangement/retuning I realized that it was taking on a strongly elegiac quality. I completed it on Saturday, November 7, 2009 in the early afternoon. Then I went out to make some field recordings of a river. The following morning I learned that it had been Jon’s last day on Earth. It was a week before I could think about this music again and realized what it was for.
Copyright 2009 by Dave Seidel, some rights reserved.
Elegy, for Jon by Dave Seidel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Tags
canons, drones, jon gams, just intonation
Zona Negativa by Normaa
Posted 15 November 2009, 11:00
Zona Negativa from normaa on Vimeo.
Zona Negativa is a short video made by Normaa, which consists of brothers Eduardo and Raùl Acosta from Gijón, Asturias, Spain. Normaa used my track A Door Into Spring as their soundtrack. Their capsule description of the piece is "Reflexión sobre la velocidad y los elementos", which I would roughly translate as "A meditation on velocity and the elements". (If anyone can provide a better, more idiomatic translation, please leave a comment.)
This is a beautiful and poetic piece, and I think the images and the sound are very well matched. I'm very happy with Normaa's use of my music, and I would love to collaborate with them again.
Tags
New release: Complex Silence 4
Posted 22 October 2009, 10:11
I am pleased to announce the release of Complex Silence 4, my contribution to Phillip Wilkerson’s Complex Silence series, distributed on the Timetheory netlabel.
The release consists of two pieces, Meridian Transit and Solar Midnight, both of which derive musical materials in various ways from the Golden Ratio. This is microtonal music, but (unusually for me) does not employ just or rational intonation. I made both tracks with blue and Csound.
To get the release (including graphics, a PDF with liner notes, and
MP3s), please visit http://www.archive.org/details/tmth06A
When time permits, I will post technical notes and source code to both pieces on this site.
Tags
canons, complex silence, drones, golden ratio, timetheory
Video: Symphony for Space Shuttle and Seidel
Posted 17 October 2009, 20:08
Here's another cool video released this week that uses one of my pieces (in this case, Nur) in its soundtrack. This one comes from a friend in the UK:
Tags
socrates, space shuttle, video
Aurora, a video by Ron Homsi
Posted 14 October 2009, 17:45
This short video called Aurora, by Rob Homsi, uses my piece Aurora as the soundtrack.
Tags
New release on Stasisfield: Elementals
Posted 10 August 2009, 07:49
I am very happy to announce a new release called Elementals on the Stasisfield netlabel. John Kannenberg has done the beautiful job of design, packaging and presentation that Statisfield followers have come to expect, and I am grateful to part of his roster.
In John’s words:
Peterborough, New Hampshire’s Dave Seidel offers a microtonal ode to the four primal elements. Water, fire, earth and air are represented here by elegant synthetic sounds and digitally manipulated field recordings. Working primarily in Csound, Seidel sculpts swathing drones and digital flutters into monolithic representations of his natural subjects. Technicians will undoubtedly consult Seidel’s notes included in the album’s digital packaging as well as the more extensive essays on his personal website for details of these tracks’ construction, while aesthetes will simply lose themselves in their overwhelming beauty.
Please go to the site and check it out.
Update 1
Kyle Gann has blogged Elementals:
Dave Seidel, who makes some of gentlest and most natural-sounding purely-tuned music around (sort of in the Eliane Radigue/Phill Niblock vein but with even softer edges, kind of happier), has a beautiful new album on the web called Elementals.
See the entire post for the rest. Thanks, Kyle!
Update 2
Links to individual pages for each piece, for those seeking details:
UnTwelve 2009 Compilation released
Posted 3 July 2009, 13:23
I’m a little tardy in mentioning the UnTwelve 2009 Compilation CD, which was released on May 29, 2009. It includes my piece Invocation and a stylistically eclectic set of excellent microtonal pieces by Dante Rosati, Carlo Serafini, Chris Bailey, Danny Wier, City of the Asleep (aka Igliashon Jones), Jacob Barton, Cameron Bobro, Aaron Krister Johnson, Kraig Grady. Go get yourself a copy and help support UnTwelve!
Tags
Invocation
Posted 2 May 2009, 22:53
Description
Quranic recitation and Tibetan Buddhist chant, combined and time-stretched with spectral processing.
Duration: 8:16
Background & Technical Details
This piece is made from two source recordings:
- a recitation of Al-Fatiha (the first verse of the Qur’an) by the great Turkish hafiz Kâni Karaça;
- an excerpt from “Kabsumpa (The Three Occasions)” as chanted by the Tibetan Buddhist monks of the Ganden Monastery in Karnakata, India.
Both were subjected to time-stretching. The Fatiha recording was stretched, rather drastically, from its original length of 1:14 to 8:16. The Kabsumpa recording was originally 5:38 and was stretched to match the 8:16 length. The only other processing was to use a technique called spectral smoothing, which has the effect of “smearing” the sound. Both tracks are at their original pitch, and were not processed in any other way — no filtering, no added reverb — other than to raise the amplitude of the Tibetan chant so that the levels of the tracks would better match. Neither track was edited in any way, except to remove a small amount of silence at the end of the Quranic recitation.
The bird song is part of the Kabsumpa recording.
For fellow Csound geeks, I used the PVS (phase vocoder) opcodes to do the time-stretching and spectral smoothing.
I am not making the source files available for download, as I don’t have the rights, but my Csound code is downloadable as usual for those who are interested.
The piece is dedicated to Alan Morse Davies, whose gorgeous music (particularly Y Bardd Glas Geraint and The Last Summer) has been a source of inspiration.
Files/Downloads
MP3 (19MB, 320kpbs, 44.1K/16)
FLAC (37MB, 618kpbs, 44.1K/16)
Csound files (1.5KB)
Copyright 2009 by Dave Seidel, some rights reserved.
Invocation by Dave Seidel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Tags
http://mysterybear.net by Dave Seidel is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.