mysterybear: Second Sleep

Second Sleep

Posted 14 July 2008, 19:10

Description

A waking dream — an
empty bowl by a still pond
lit by the full moon.

Duration: 7:53

Background & Technical Details

Second Sleep returns to the harmonic material I first started exploring in Aurora. In this piece, I move from one pentatonic scale (introduced as a slow, rising arpeggio and prolonged as a chordal drone) to another pentatonic scale, and back again. The continuous background drone consists of the “root” (1/1) pitch shared by both pentatonic scales, along with three other pitches that do not appear in either of the scales.

The first pentatonic scale (expressed as ratios) is:
1/1 9/8 151/128 3/2 25/16

The second pentatonic scale is:
1/1 37/32 21/16 49/32 7/4

The drone is built from the pitch set
1/1 65/64 43/32 57/32

The pentatonic scales/chords use a modified version of a Csound/blue instrument called Resonant Rhythm by Atte André Jensen. Atte describes his instrument as an “animated, resonant pad/drone/bass instrument with tempo sync”. As he designed it, it produces a steady pulse at a given rate, with randomized filtering applied to each successive note. I modified it for my own nefarious purposes in a couple of different ways:

I made the articulation of the beat-to-beat transitions much “softer”, so that the beats aren’t really perceived as such;
I used nine oscillators with very small pitch offsets rather than one, similar to the Risset harmonic arpeggio technique, to make the sound richer, giving it an almost horn-like quality.

In all instances of the modified Resonant Rhythm (MRR) instrument, I used a pulse-width modulated square wave.

Parts of the background drone (1/1 in three octaves) also use the MRR instrument. The other three pitches use a Risset harmonic arpeggio instrument with a waveform built from the the first eleven harmonics from the Fibonacci sequence (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and 144).

Copyright & Licensing

Files/Downloads

MP3 (18MB, 44.1K/16-bit, 320kpbs)
blue & Csound project files, Scala files (12KB)

Comments

Great new song, I really like it.

— doug 16 July 2008, 08:30 #