mysterybear: tag

Drone Instrument/Sruti Box: New Version

Posted 14 November 2010, 08:47

Latest release: version 2.8, 14-Nov-2010 (see release notes below).

In 2005, I made a drone instrument. It’s been in the back of my mind for a long time to revise it, and I have finally done so. Here is a substantially rewritten version, one that has better sound quality and more sonic possibilities. Hopefully it is also easier to use.

You are welcome to use this instrument in your own music. If you do, I’d love to know about it and hear the recordings (if any).

Before I explain how to install and use it, I’d first like to thank Andrés Cabrera and his collaborators for QuteCsound, the excellent new authoring and performance front-end for Csound. I made this instrument in QuteCsound, and QuteCsound is required to play it. Andres and Joachim Heintz generously helped me to get this right, fixing bugs and offering useful suggestions.

Thanks also to David First, from whose article The Music of the Sphere: An Investigation into Asymptotic Harmonics, Brainwave Entrainment and the Earth as a Giant Bell comes the Asymptotic Sawtooth Wave, which is a new waveform choice in this version of the instrument.

For background information, please see the original article for background information on the drone box, much of which still applies.

Click for a full-size image.

Installing

Download Csound5 from here – here is the link to the Windows installer. There are Mac and Linux versions as well, and they should all work, but I have not used them myself.
Run the Csound5 installer you just downloaded.
Download the Sruti/Drone Box and save it somewhere that you’ll remember, such as the desktop.

Running

Run QuteCsound: on Windows, go to the Csound menu from the Start button and then click “qutecsound”).
Open the Sruti/Drone Box in QuteCsound: click the Open button, find the Sruti/Drone Box file you downloaded above and double-click it (the filename is SuiteDrone-2.8.csd).
If you don’t see something that looks like the image above, click the Widgets button in QuteCsound.
When you see the Sruti/Drone Box, click the Start button.

Playing

There are two different approaches to setting the base pitch (i.e., the pitch against which the individual drone ratios are measured):
- Set it as a raw frequency in hertz (i.e., cycles per second) in the *Base (Hz)” field
- Set it as using pitch class notation — a number like 5.11, where the number on the left is the octave and the number on the right is a note number ranging from 0 to 11 (based on standard equal temperament, with 12 notes to the octave, where 0 equals C, 1 equals C#, etc.). You must have the “Pitch Class” option checked for this to work. If you use this method, you may also use the drop-down menu to set the note by name as an alternative to remembering note numbers.
There are four different drones, each with its own pitch ratio and octave (relative to the base pitch, which is also settable). To play a drone, click its On button. Each drone has a green “LED” that lights up to indicate that it’s playing. Click Off to stop the drone. You can start or stop all drones at once using the “All On” and “All Off” buttons.
Use the Wave button to select a waveform; this is applied to all four drones. The Wave setting will not change any drones that are already playing. If you change it, you must turn the drones off and on again.
There are three different effects: Risset harmonic arpeggio, binaural beating, and reverb. You may change any of these settings at any time, even when the drones are playing, and your changes will take place immediately.
With the exception of the Wave setting, you may change all other settings, such as the pitch controls in real time, and the changes will take effect immediately.

Effects

The harmonic arpeggio effect is most effective (for the way I most often use it) at small values around 0.01, but you can get some interesting sounds at higher settings.
Binaural beating: the BPS (beats per second) setting determines the beating rate; the Level setting determines how loud the beating signal will be (in addition to the regular drones).
Reverb: you should probably keep the Feedback setting at least slightly below 1.0, otherwise the signal may get out of control.
To disable the harmonic arpeggio effect, set its level to 0.
To disable binaural beating, set its level to 0.
To disable reverb, set the slider all the way to “Dry”.
You may change all of the effects settings in real time.

Recording the Output

As of version 2.8, you may specify the name of a file to which the sound output will be recorded as a 16-bit, 44.1 kHz WAV file. If you leave this field blank, no file will be made.
- Caveat 1: if you use this option, it is likely to cause the realtime sound output to glitch; however, the soundfile itself should contain a clean recording.
- Caveat 2: you should specify the output file using a complete path, otherwise you may not be able the file (although it will probably be located in the same directory as the CSD file). Likewise, you should name the file with the extension “.wav” (e.g., “mydrone.wav”), because an extension will not be added automatically.
You should set the filename before you click the “Start” button. If you change it after you click “Start”, the change will have no effect.

Presets

QuteCsound has a preset features that allows you to save your settings, including multiple variations of setting. This is very handy if you come up with different tunings and effects configurations: just save them, each with a different name, and you can recall them at any time (without having to do something tedious like writing them all down and painstakingly reentering them).

If you right-click on the Sruti/Drone Box, you will see three items at the end of the menu called “Store Preset”, “Recall Preset” and “New Preset”. Use Store to save your current settings, either to an existing preset name or to a new one; use Recall to use a previously saved preset; use New to make a new one.

I have established a few presets to give you some idea of the possibilities.

Tuning Ratios

I use ratios because I prefer the sound of intervals tuned in just intonation, and ratios are the simplest and most precise notation for describing them.

Here are some commonly used ratios for a diatonic scale in just intonation (the note names are for reference only):

C D E F G A B C

1/1 9/8 5/4 4/3 3/2 5/3 15/8 2/1

There are many other possible ratios, even for a diatonic scale. See Tuning Systems and follow the links if you would like to know more.

For an Indian classical music perspective on tuning and just intonation, see Shrutis in Hindustani Music.

Sample Drones

Sruti/Drone Box samples by mysterybear

Updates & Release Notes

version 2.8 (14-Nov-2010)
- option to record session (WAV file)
- use vco2 for higher-quality saw, square, and (new) triangle waves; still using poscil3 for other waves
- add a fifth drone
- add “All On” and “All Off” buttons to activate/deactivate all drones at once
- rename “Notes” to “Pitch class”
version 2.7 (09-Oct-2010)
- always play primary oscillator for each tone, independent of harmonic arpeggio or binaural beat output
- made all pitch controls (Ratio, 8ve, and Base) changeable in realtime
- add option to tune base frequency to conventional (Western) pitches, using pitch-class (8ve.note) or note name
version 2.6 (26-Sep-2010)
- add level control for Risset effect (now labelled Harmonic Arpeggio); this allows the use of binaural beating by itself
- line up all effects horizontally
- use SpinBox for Harmonic Arpeggio Offset and Binaural Beats BPS, for finer control
- normalize level controls to use 0.0-1.0 range
- change multiplier for BB level from 5x to 4x, seems to match HA level better
- layout tweakage
version 2.5 (12 -Sep-2010)
- base freq. now has greater precision to make it easier to tune to other instruments, thanks to David First
version 2.4 (12-Sep-2010)
- fixes a bug in the binaural beating code, thanks to Mark Van Peteghem for pointing it out
version 2.3 (12-Sep-2010)
- first release of the new version

Download Links

Tags

csound, david first, drones, just intonation, qutecsound, realtime, sruthi box, sruti box

No-R-mal II: Penumbral

Posted 8 August 2010, 10:19

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 by mysterybear

Tags

drones, just intonation, justnotnormal, la monte young, no-r-mal

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

Elegy, for Jon

Posted 18 November 2009, 19:40

Jon playing his Guild, 1966

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.

Download MP3
Download Csound/blue source files

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

Herald of Water, Herald of Air

Posted 25 February 2009, 23:15

Description

Two versions of a tantric fanfare. Dedicated to La Monte Young and Lois V Vierk.

Duration: 16:03 each version, or 32:06 total

Background & Technical Details

A single chord, eleven notes, built up slowly from low to high. Each voice has a regular pulse that starts almost completely still and accelerates to a speed proportional to its pitch — the higher the note, the faster the pulse. From the peak, everything decelerates together, back to near stasis.

The pulses are shaped, dynamically and timbrally, by a random process, a different sequence for each voice. The “Water” version has smooth transitions from one pulse to the next, producing an undulating texture. The “Air” version has abrupt transitions, resulting in a percussive/plucked/struck attack. This is the only difference between the two versions of the piece, except for the random aspect (which makes every rendering or performance somewhat unique). In character, I think “Water” is more ambient and “Air” is more ecstatic.

This chord is built by combining two of La Monte Young’s chords¹, the Opening Chord and the Magic Chord. These are the pitches, expressed as multipliers of the unheard base pitch of 60Hz:

2, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5.0625, 5.25, 6.75, 10.125, 12, 13.5

The instrument design is derived from Atte André Jensen’s ResonantRhythm, which I tweaked quite a bit for my own purposes, quite different from Atte’s original intention. I’m grateful to Atte for all his work on this and a number of other useful instrument and effect designs for Csound/blue.

Of course, I am deeply indebted to La Monte Young for the Opening Chord and the Magic Chord, as well for his (and Michael Harrison’s) “cloud” technique, which inspired the texture of this piece.

I am also in debt to to Lois V Vierk, in particular her use of logarithmic curves as a key structural element. I was fortunate to have worked with Lois for a while as a player (I participated in the premiere live and recorded performances of her pieces Go Guitars and Red Shift), and being “inside” her music was a profound experience that has had a deep effect on me as a composer. The accelerations and decelerations in this piece are linear rather than logarithmic, but they nonetheless are informed by Lois’ example.

¹ Kyle Gann, “The Outer Edge of Consonance,” in William Duckworth and Richard Fleming (editors), Sound and Light, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1996), page 174.

Files/Downloads

MP3 – Herald of Water (37MB, 320kpbs)
MP3 – Herald of Air (37MB, 320kpbs)
blue project and Csound orchestra/score (6KB)

Copyright 2009 by Dave Seidel, some rights reserved.

Herald of Water, Herald of Air by Dave Seidel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Tags

drones, just intonation, la monte young, lois v vierk

Nur

Posted 11 January 2009, 18:44

Description

Ecstatic light: a virtual dhikr.

Duration: 7:50

Background & Technical Details

This is my first SuperCollider (SC) piece. Having just put out a CD-R release, the result of three years or so of working with Csound, it seemed like a good time to try something new. Another excuse for experimentation was provided by an invitation to participate in the first show in the Unique States series. As I prepared for this event, I ported my Csound Risset harmonic arpeggio instrument to SC and started playing around with it in real time (something which is much easier to do in SC than in Csound). This piece is what emerged. I performed it for the first time at the Unique States event at BUOY in Kittery, Maine on Friday, January 9, 2009.

While it is intended to be performed live, I have included a rendering of the piece (available below) for people who just want to listen. If you use SuperCollider, and would like to try this, the source file (also available below) contains comments that explain how to play it; you should find it quite straight-forward. (Please note, if you are an SC aficionado: I know that the piece could have been written more compactly, but I am still a newbie, and I chose to err in the direction of directness, simplicity and readability as opposed to elegance. Plenty of time to get fancy later.)

The piece itself is no radical departure from my previous work, but continues to explore some of the things I find interesting, in particular the use of interference patterns to create subtle rhythms, the tension between stasis and constant change, and the power of perfectly tuned consonance.

If you listen to this on speakers (as opposed to headphones), please turn it up — the sound should fill the room.

Files/Downloads

MP3 (18MB, 320kpbs)
SuperCollider code (5KB)

Copyright 2009 by Dave Seidel, some rights reserved.

Nur by Dave Seidel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Tags

drones, just intonation, supercollider

Unstill Light

Posted 27 October 2008, 21:19

Description

Epimoric dream music. For Greg Schiemer and Warren Burt.

Duration: 7:49

Background & Technical Details

The initial spark for “Unstill Light” was a piece by Greg Schiemer called Tempered Dekanies and his related article Tempered Dekanies: Chorus effect using microtonal intervals based on just intonation. As described in the paper, and heard in the piece, Greg came up with an Csound instrument design that is based on the Risset harmonic glissandi. This was intriguing, as I have used a similar instrument in several of my pieces; however, Greg added a couple of new wrinkles, once of which is particularly interesting: using superparticular (or epimoric) ratios to determine the frequency differences between the stacked oscillator tones that together produce the output of the instrument. I immediately wanted to explore that idea, and I ended up writing something that is entirely based on epimoric ratios and uses a version of Greg’s Risset instrument (modified to produce a different effect from the one he used in his piece).

Fundamentally, the piece is based on the superparticular series 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, 6/5, 7/6, 9/8. If you treat these numbers as musical intervals relative to a “root” (1/1) pitch, they get progressively narrower as one moves through the series (3/2 is a just perfect fifth, 9/8 is a just major second, and the others fail in between). Then for each number in the series I computed the ratio that is the “harmonic mean” between that number and 1/1, giving the series 5/4, 7/6, 9/8, 11/10, 13/12, 15/14, 17/16 (note that these are all superparticular as well). Finally, I made two more series that consist of the the reciprocals of the two original series. If we stack up all four series, add in the 1/1 pitch, and look at it in table form, the columns form the chords that are the harmonic basis of the piece (top-to-bottom = high-to-low pitch):

3/2	4/3	5/4	6/5	7/6	8/7	9/8
5/4	7/6	9/8	11/10	13/12	15/14	17/16
1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1
4/5	6/7	8/9	10/11	12/13	14/15	16/17
2/3	3/4	4/5	5/6	6/7	7/8	8/9

The chords get narrower and more closely-voiced as they progress, converging on the central root pitch.

However, the chords are not simply played as blocks. Except for the central 1/1 pitch, which remains constant, the horizontal voices are offset from one another, so that the chords change gradually, one note at a time.

Getting back my modified Schiemer/Risset instrument, I didn’t employ Greg’s use of envelopes to vary the pitch offsets, using constant offsets instead. I also decided to use much smaller ratios (based on twin primes 1021 and 1023) for the oscillator offsets, resulting in a 2:1 beating pattern (DAH-dit, DAH-dit). Since the duration of the beats depends on the pitch, two or more voices at different pitches played together creates a rhythmic counterpoint. Different lines come in and out of sync with one another, sounding at times like arpeggios.

The chords played on the pulsating Scheimer/Risset instrument have no added effects, but they are backed with a reverb-processed drone. The only sound source used is a precision sine wave generator.

Thanks very much to Greg Schiemer for his music, for corresponding with me about his work, and for allowing me to study his Csound code. I also dedicate “Unstill Light” to Warren Burt, another source of inspiration.

Copyright & Licensing

Files/Downloads

MP3 (17.8MB, 320kpbs)
blue project (35KB)

Tags

drones, epimores, greg schiemer, just intonation, superparticular numbers, twin primes, warren burt

Law of Octaves

Posted 12 August 2008, 14:29

Description

A third take on the idea in I first explored in Drift Dhikr, with a richer timbre and harmonic texture.

Duration: 9:03

Background & Technical Details

As I indicate above, this is my third attempt at expressing a rather simple idea: a simple chord, augmented by continuously-generated difference and summation tones, that glides from a starting consonance to an ending consonance via a long gradual glissando. The first piece used simple sine waves; the second piece used a form of FM synthesis. This one is back to plain old oscillators, but with some other refinements:

a more complex waveform, built from the first seven unique partials in the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21)
a more complex chord — the original chord plus the indentical one tranposed to the just perfect fourth (4/3) in a lower octave
movement in space by panning from the center to both sides.

I like the results better than the two previous pieces, and hope that you do as well. I won’t get into an explication of the title, which you can discover for yourself if so inclined.

Copyright & Licensing

Files/Downloads

MP3 (21MB, 48K/16-bit, 320kpbs)
Csound project file (102KB)

Tags

combination tones, drones, just intonation

Second Sleep

Posted 14 July 2008, 20:10

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)

Tags

drones, just intonation, kraig grady, meta-slendro, mount meru

Aurora (for Kraig Grady)

Posted 15 September 2007, 15:43

Description

Dawn on Mount Meru. Inspired by the work and encouragement of Kraig Grady.

Duration: 3:04

Background & Technical Details

I’ve been listening to music by Kraig Grady recently, and decided that I wanted to start exploring some of the scales he’s been using, in particular the family of tunings he calls “meta-slendro”. At Kraig’s suggestion, I started with his article An Introduction To The Scales Of Mt Meru And Other Recurrent Sequence Scales. The meta-slendro scales are derived from numeric sequences found in Pascal’s Triangle, specifically the one Kraig refers to as Meru #3.

In this piece, I use a 7-note scale and a 5-note scale, which I built using Scala. I started with a 12-note “chromatic” scale built from harmonics 9 through 200 in the Meru #3 sequence, as Kraig recommends in his article. Then I used Scala’s “mos” command to derive various subsets. Of these, I chose a 7-note scale and a 5-note scale that both used generator 7. Of the two only the latter can be called meta-slendro, since slendro is a pentatonic scale. But I like the way they sound together.

For each scale, I wrote lines that consist of permutations of two-note chords, or dyads, within an octave. These lines are played by instruments that simulate the sound of Tibetan bells (using these handy tables of modal frequency ratios). The 5-note scale uses a sequence of 19 notes, played twice (once forward and once retrograde) for a long phrase of 38 beats. The 7-notes scale uses a sequence of 41 notes, played once forward. Played together, these phrases make a rhythmic ratio of 38:41.

Underneath are droney loops made mostly from notes that are present in the original 12-note scale but not in the 5- and 7-note scales, along with a chord build up from combination tones based on the interval 1.324717957/1 (1.324717957 is the number towards which the Meru #3 sequence converges).

Update #1, 16 Sep 2007:

I’d like to thanks Steven Yi again, not just for blue, which has become indispensable, but also for his Mode 6 and Horner/Ayers horn Csound instrument designs, both of which I adapted for use in this piece. Please listen to his music too, it’s wonderful stuff.

Update #2, 16 Sep 2007:

Thanks to some very constructive comments from Carl Lumma and Rick McGowan on the Making Microtonal Music list, I have added more gain to the sound files and re-uploaded them.

Copyright & Licensing

Files/Downloads

MP3 (7.3MB, 48K/16-bit, 320kpbs)
blue & Csound project files, Scala files (23KB)

Tags

bells, drones, horns, just intonation, kraig grady, meta-slendro, mount meru

Palimpsest

Posted 13 May 2007, 11:58

Description

A meditation on remembrance, breath, stasis and change.

Duration: 10:58

Background & Technical Details

Palimpsest is the second in a series of works that began with Owllight (although it remains to be seen whether or not the series will continue). While the pieces have very different moods, they both employ cellular automata as a kind of structural template, and both are built from very simple materials: sine waves, some reverb, and very few notes.

Rule 57, width 68, height 100 As in Owllight, the harmonic spectrum of every note is determined by the successive states of a simple one-dimensional cellular automaton (in this case, Rule 57) as shown on the right. The states start at the top of the image, with one state per row. A row consists of a series of “cells”, each of which is either “alive” (black) or “dead” (white). I treat each cell as a harmonic (i.e., an integral multiple of the base tone), so the more cells that are “alive”, the richer the sound. Each harmonic is made by an individual sine wave tone.

Palimpsest consists entirely of two two-note chords: 60Hz + 90hz (3/2, a just perfect fifth) and 67.5Hz + 90Hz (4/3, a just perfect fourth). Each chord proceeds through the series of spectral transformations represented by the diagram, but the chords are offset by the exact duration of a single state (the perfect fifth starts, and the perfect fourth follows), so that the chords alternate throughout the piece. In addition to the spectral changes, change occurs at two other levels. The length of the state (the “beat” of the piece) continually decreases at a slow rate, which provides an almost imperceptible sense of acceleration. Also, with every successive “beat”, the individual tones that make the harmonics are arpeggiated at a slightly greater rate, so that the chords get progressively more “smeared” over time; you can hear this most clearly on the very last chord in the piece.

This piece is dedicated to Carter Scholz, whose album Eight Pieces continues to inspire me. (Scholz co-wrote a very interesting sci-fi novel called Palimpsests that was published in 1984, but I had already named the piece before I remembered the book.)

Copyright & Licensing

Files/Downloads

MP3 (25MB, 48K/16-bit, 320kpbs)
blue & Csound project files (102KB)

Tags

cellular automata, just intonation

Owllight

Posted 10 April 2007, 11:58

Description

An ambient piece in a dark and mysterious mood.

Duration: 7 minutes.

Background & Technical Details

I first encountered the word “owllight” (in hyphenated form) in the Dylan Thomas poem Altarwise by owl-light, which I first read as a teenager. The word hadn’t occurred to me in many years, but as I worked on this piece and searched for a title, I remembered the term and it felt right. I looked it up online and found a great definition from Webster’s 1913 dictionary: “glimmering or imperfect light”. The piece has, to my ears, a somewhat somber, mysterious, and possibly foreboding mood, which seems appropriate given the place the owl occupies in folklore. I’m also reminded of the creepy owls in Twin Peaks, which were apparently based on aspects of Native American mythology. (“The owls are not what they seem.”)

The technical notes that follow may be irrelevant to your experience of listening to the piece, but I present them (as I generally do) in case someone is curious about the compositional process I followed.

This piece is made by varying the harmonic spectra of three tones at 60Hz, 90Hz, and 97.08Hz, which we hear as root (1/1, at stereo center), perfect fifth (3/2 or 1.5/1, at stereo left), and sharp or augmented fifth (1.618/1, which is an approximation of the golden ratio, at stereo right). The ~7Hz difference between the second and third pitches produces a binaural beating effect in the approximate range of the transition between alpha and theta waves. If you listen carefully, you will hear this three-note phrase repeating throughout the piece.

The structure of the piece is governed by the first 97 states of a 1-dimensional cellular automaton known as Rule 150. I treat the center cell in each state as the fundamental and the cells on either side as harmonics (odd-numbered on one side, even-numbered on the other side).

I wrote this using Steven Yi’s fantastic program blue, which is a front end for Csound. This is the first time I used the blue feature that allows one to generate the Csound score from Python code. The code that calculates cellular automata is based on a Python Cookbook entry by Rick Muller. The sounds themselves are entirely made up of individually-generated sine waves with some reverb; I used no other waveforms or effects of any kind.

Copyright & Licensing

Files/Downloads

MP3 (16MB, 44.1K/16-bit, 320kpbs)
blue & Csound project files (39KB)

Tags

cellular automata, golden ratio, just intonation

TimeWave Canon

Posted 22 July 2006, 12:58

Description

A mensuration canon in just intonation based on Terence McKenna’s TimeWave Zero. Revised 22 July 2006.

Duration: 4 minutes, 56 seconds.

Background & Technical Details

Terence McKenna was one of the more interesting counter-cultural thinkers to emerge in the Sixties. His novelty theory is largely based on a mathematical construct called the TimeWave, which has its origin in a particular arrangement of the I Ching called the King Wen sequence. While McKenna’s explanation of the TimeWave is interesting, a paper by physicist John Sheliak (page context) provides a clearer and more mathematically rigorous account.

I have no opinion on novelty theory per se, but I have for several years been fascinated by the form of the TimeWave that Sheliak calls the Tri-Level Bi-Directional Wave (see Figure 4 in the McKenna article and Figure 10 in the Sheliak article). Without getting into too many details, the essence of it is a sequence of 64 integers, superimposed upon itself. One layer is a single cycle, which defines one period of the overall wave; the next layer is two cycles; the third layer is six cycles. Actually, each layer consists of two sequences: the original sequence and a retrograde-inversion of the original sequence, so there are six lines altogether. It made sense to me to see this object in musical terms, where each integer represents a note in some scale, and each of the three layers represents a two-voice sequence of those pitches in time. So I decided to translated the wave into sound, but first I had to choose an appropriate musical language.

Within any cycle of the TimeWave, the set of integers has a very small range, between 1 and 6. Since seven-note scales or modes are so frequently used in music around the world, I decided that I would limit myself to something in that domain. Something about the “contrapuntal” structure of the wave reminded me of Gamelan, which led me to make my first attempt using a pelog scale and bell- or gong-like timbres. But I don’t have access to convincing gamelan sounds, nor do I have a deep understanding of gamelan, so I abandoned that approach. I eventually settled on a scale similar to the following:

C D E♭ F♯ G A B♭ C

which contains some of my favorite intervals: the minor third, the augmented fourth and the flat seventh. There are a number of ways to express this scale in just intonation, and this is the one I chose:

1/1 9/8 7/6 7/5 3/2 5/3 7/4 2/1

Each two-voice sequence is presented in its own octave, where the slowest single-cycle line is in a lower octave, the two-cycle line is one octave higher in pitch, and the six-cycle line is another octave higher.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it didn’t occur to me for quite a while that the structure of the music that emerged can be considered a mensuration canon, which is a type of canon where the different voices play the same music at different speeds. My flimsy excuse for this belated realization is that it’s been 28 years since I studied music in college.

The piece starts (and ends) with a slightly reverb-processed sine-wave choir that plays the minor seventh chord that is implied by the scale. Before the full six-voice canon begins, you hear one complete cycle at the highest octave and speed.

I wrote the piece using Steven Yi’s excellent program blue as a front-end to Csound 5.0. Blue’s Microtonal Piano Roll feature allowed me to work directly with the scale I built in Scala, and the very cool BlueX7 feature made it very easy to use Russell Pinkston’s DX7 emulation instrument designs for Csound.

The piece is dedicated to the memory of Terence McKenna, whom I wish I had met, and also to John Sheliak, with gratitude for his willingness to discuss the TimeWave through an email conversation.

Revised, 22 July 2006: In the process of preparing an eight-channel version of the piece, I made a new stereo version that makes a much better use of space relative to the orginal version. Each sequence now starts with the two voices on separate sides of the stereo field, which then cross-pan to swap places. The cross-pan recurs for each repetition of the sequence.

Update, 23 September 2006: The eight-channel version of TimeWave Canon was played last night (22 September 2006) as part of the final concert of the third annual Mid-Autumn Harvest Moon Festival at Concordia University in Montreal. Thanks to Kevin Austin at Concordia for encouraging me to participate, and also to Mark Corwin, Yves Chigon, the students, and everyone else who made this event so collegial and congenial.

Update, 31 October 2008: Updated the link to the Sheliak paper to go directly to the PDF in its new location, and added a link to the page on which it is now found.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

MP3 (4MB)
blue & Csound project files (19KB)

Tags

bells, canons, just intonation, timewave

Drift Dhikr II

Posted 2 April 2006, 12:26

Description

Or, “Heraclitus Takes It to the Bridge.” Ambient but intense. Should be played loud.

Duration: 5 minutes.

Background & Technical Details

I was inspired by a pair of Csound instruments designed by Anthony Kozar as seen in a recent post of his, where the output of several oscillators is accumulated and used to frequency-modulate a carrier wave.

Among other changes, I modified Anthony’s carrier instrument so that it glides from a starting pitch to an ending pitch along an exponential curve, and made two instances: one that glides from 2/1 (the octave) down to 3/2 (a perfect fifth), and one that glides from 1/1 (the “root”) up to 3/2. For each carrier I used a set of eleven modulators, tuned to a sequence of prime harmonics starting with 3.

The end result, like the first Drift Dhikr, is a complex resonant drone that is simultaneously static and constantly changing. The timbre in this piece is more intense than in the earlier piece because of the use of FM synthesis, and I have made it a “hotter” mix as well. I’ve tried to approach the intensity of good old electric guitar feedback, though (alas) with fewer of the chaotic elements that occur when vibrating metal wires in a magnetic field are sympathetically excited by a bath of high volume sound waves from a Marshall amp turned up to 11.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

MP3 (11MB)
Csound unified score file (7KB)

Tags

drones, just intonation

Threnody

Posted 24 March 2006, 13:18

Description

In memory of the civilian casualties of the war in Iraq and all other victims of political violence around the world.

Update: I’ve replaced the sound files with a version that improves the balance and equalization.

Duration: 5 minutes, 30 seconds

Background & Technical Details

This piece began as a couple of experiments. I had been playing with a pair of complex sawtooth-like waveforms and found that I liked the sound they made when arranged according to the first ten pitches in the harmonic series and spread out across the stereo image. I had separately been playing with a Csound instrument design that added a jitter value to the pitch where the amplitude of the jitter was proportional to the frequency. Applying the jittering to the drone using a small amount of variation (3% of the frequency for each note) made it much richer.

I also tried multiplying the frequency with the jitter rather than adding or subtracting. This resulted in a much wilder sound, since the resulting pitch variations are so broad that the original pitch is replaced by a range of pitches connected in a continuous glissando. I did this with the same chord as the drone, but two octaves higher and with simple sine waves rather then the harmonically-rich waves I used for the drone. The result sounded almost like voices to me (albeit non-human ones).

Then I combined the drone with the “voices”, along with some fairly heavy reverb, and got a dark and somewhat spooky sound where the vocal-like sounds are partially buried in the all-encompassing drone (they start in the low part of the spectrum at about 1:15 and expand into higher registers over the next 4 minutes, but remain somewhat subliminal throughout).

Note: this piece is best experienced using headphones.

As the piece started to come together, the visual image that emerged was that of vast aerial beings in a deep atmosphere — I’ve been entranced for a long time by the idea that we live at the bottom of an ocean of air. However, as it developed further, the piece took on a darker, more somber quality, and the “voices” began to sound like wailing. I thought of the high number of non-combatant lives lost in Iraq over the past three years; some estimates put the number as high as 37,000 or more, and growing. Also, as it happens, I finished this piece on March 11, the second anniversary of the Madrid train bombings. Thus, the title and dedication of the piece.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

MP3 (12MB)
OGG (19MB)
Csound unified score file (8KB)

Tags

drones, just intonation

Sublimation (Realtime Version)

Posted 11 March 2006, 12:52

Description

A live performance version of my piece Sublimation, as arranged by Art Hunkins. Requires Csound 5.0 and a MIDI controller with 6-8 sliders or rotary pots.

Duration: 12 minutes.

Background & Technical Details

This is Art’s fourth realtime arrangement of one of my pieces. This one pushes the envelope — the sheer number of simultaneous oscillators along with the reverb processing makes this a very processor-intensive piece. Art made two variations, one using precision oscillators (as in my original version) and one using lower-precision interpolating oscillators, and also explains how to adjust the sampling rate if necessary to achieve a smooth performance; this is all explained in his performance notes.

Thanks again to Art for his dedication, time and energy. I appreciate his hard work not only on a selfish level, but also because of his tireless efforts to promote Csound as a viable and powerful tool for cross-platform realtime musical performance. To other Csound composers, I recommend reading and studying his code to learn some great techniques. Please visit Art’s site to check out his own beautiful and contemplative music.

Files

Performance notes (9KB)
CSD files and performance notes, as a zip archive (9KB)

Tags

art hunkins, collaborations, combination tones, just intonation, la monte young, midi, realtime

Sublimation

Posted 18 January 2006, 12:13

Description

A drone of varying densities built from layers of complex justly-intoned chords with scintillating harmonics.

Duration: 12 minutes.

Background & Technical Details

My primary motivation for this piece was to continue working with chords built from combination tones (see Combination Study 1, Cloud Dragon, Drift Dhikr, and Drift Dhikr Interactive) but to start exploring denser, more complex sonorities.

I continue to be fascinated and inspired by La Monte Young’s work, in this case three specific chords from The Well-Tuned Piano and various sine-tone installations: the Opening Chord, the Magic Chord, and the Magic Opening Chord. I didn’t use Young’s chords literally, but instead made five new chords whose pitches I derived based on the combination tones (summation, difference, and periodicity pitch) implied by his chords. The piece was built by combining these five chords in various layers.

Sine waves are the only sound materials used in this piece, but they are processed using a type of reverberation. I used this particular reverb opcode in Csound because it not only provides the sense of spaciousness one would expect, but also has the side-effect of creating a kind of randomized arpeggiation in the higher harmonics that evokes for me the visual phenomenon that astronomers call scintillation. If the resulting timbres seem to be more complex than simple sine waves, it’s because of the number of sine oscillators that sound simultaneously (from a minimum of 35 to a maximum of 209), and because the precise mathematical relationships between the tones creates the impression of complex composite waveforms. The “rhythms” in the middle of the piece are examples of the acoustical phenomenon of beating, which I worked with previously in The Gemini Nebula.

In the title, I’m using the word sublimation based on its meaning in the physical realm, inspired by recent conditions here in the New Hampshire countryside where the snow fields have been covered with dense white mist.

It’s important to mention that I couldn’t have made this piece (or my other La Monte Young-related pieces) without the help of Kyle Gann’s article The Outer Edge of Consonance: Snapshots from the Evolution of La Monte Young’s Tuning Installations in the book Sound and Light, which is essential to any serious study of Young’s music.

Update: A belated “thank you” to Kyle Gann for adding Sublimation to the playlist for his PostClassic Radio show!

Update 2 (15 June 2006): I am pleased to note that Tim Rutherford-Johnson (see the comments section) has been kind enough to include Sublimation in a very cool avant-classical mix Thanks, Tim!

Copyright & Licensing

Files

MP3 (28MB)
OGG (5MB)
Csound unified score file (7KB)

Tags

combination tones, drones, just intonation, la monte young

Drift Dhikr Interactive

Posted 26 July 2005, 18:55

Description

A live performance version of my piece Drift Dhikr, as arranged by Art Hunkins. For realtime versions of Csound, with or without MIDI controllers.

Background & Technical Details

See the Drift Dhikr page for background. Art’s arrangements (there are actually twelve different variants) make it possible for the performer to control several aspects of the piece, including the duration, the choice of starting interval, and more. Several of the variants are designed specifically for people with hardware MIDI controllers. See Art’s performance notes for all the details.

This is the third collaboration so far for Art and me, and as before I thank him for his interest and his energy. Please be sure to check out Art’s own music. It’s great stuff.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

Performance notes (10KB)
CSD files and performance notes, as a zip archive (44KB)

Tags

art hunkins, collaborations, combination tones, just intonation, midi, realtime

Drift Dhikr

Posted 8 July 2005, 10:53

Description

Alternate title: Combination Study 2

Pitches start at the perfect fifth and simultaneously glide up to the octave and down to tonic, and an ever-changing chord emerges from the reinforced difference and summation tones. A slowly changing ambient landscape of relative consonance and dissonance.

Duration: 9 minutes 3 seconds.

Background & Technical Details

In an earlier piece, Combination Study 1, I made a Csound instrument that, given a two pitches, played a chord consisting of that interval plus six derived pitches: first, second, and third-order difference tones; first and second-order summation tones; and periodicity pitch. I have now extended this idea to intervals that are not fixed, but change over time in a glissando. As one or both of the primary tones glide from one pitch to another, combination tones are continuously computed and played, making a chord built from several simultaneous glissandi.

This piece has three layers:

starting with the interval formed by a pitch at 1/1 and a pitch at 3/2, where the 3/2 glides down to 1/2 and the 1/1 remains constant (the conbination tones come from the moving pitch in relation to the fixed pitch);
starting with the interval formed by a pitch at 1/1 and a pitch at 3/2, where the 3/2 glides to 2/1 and the 1/1 remains constant (the conbination tones come from the moving pitch in relation to the fixed pitch);
starting with a unison — both pitches at 3/2 — where one pitch glides down to 1/1 and the other pitch glides up to 2/1 (the combination tones come from the two moving pitches in relation to each other).

Heard together, the three layers form a single chord that is constantly changing. The length of the piece is in a sense arbitrary — at shorter durations, you can hear the glissandi, but at longer duractions, the effect is much more subtle. I chose a nine minute duration for this rendition because I prefer the slower pace, but it’s short enough to make a reasonable download. If I ever put it on a CD or some other media, I will probably make it at least twice as long.

All glissandi follow exponential curves. Sine tones are the only sonic material, post-processed with some reverb.

The word drift in the title is a reference to La Monte Young’s Drift Studies. These were a series of drone pieces for sine tones that Young made in the days before he had access to the very stable sine wave oscillators he now uses; the tones would “drift” in and out of phase and pitch, hence the name.

Dhikr (Arabic for “remembrance”) is a Sufi spiritual practice that has the goal of maintaining in the participant an awareness of the presence of God. It is characterized by the rhythmic repetition (silent or aloud) of certain words or phrases, sometimes with instrumental accompaniment. This piece is not meant to sound like any kind of traditional dhikr, but it is possible to listen to it in a meditational context as a metaphor for the journey from oneness to Oneness, which corresponds to one of the aims of dhikr.

Drift Dhikr is dedicated to Lois V Vierk.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

MP3 audio (21.2MB)
Csound unified score file (11KB)

Tags

combination tones, just intonation

Resonant Palindrome

Posted 12 March 2005, 22:45

Description

A variation on La Monte Young’s 1989 sine-tone installation The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 144 to 112 with 119. An electronic piece written and realized with Csound.

This is a revision of a piece called Symmetrical Melodic Variation on the Romantic Symmetry, originally published on 6 January 2005.

Dedicated to La Monte Young in his 70th year.

Duration: 9 minutes.

Background & Technical Details

La Monte Young’s Romantic Symmetry is a piece consisting of a chord of 22 sustained tones that express a specific set of harmonics of a 7.5 Hz fundamental frequency. All of these harmonics are prime or octaves of primes, except for 119. It is one of Young’s sine-tone installations, intended to run continuously for extended periods of time. The frequencies in the piece range from 60 Hz up to 8.64 kHz.

I have never actually heard Young’s piece as originally rendered, as it has not been recorded (or if recorded, not released) and I have had no opportunity to experience an installation of it, but I’ve been fascinated by this entire family of works as described by Kyle Gann in his article “The Outer Edge of Consonance” from the book Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela (Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg 1996, ISBN 0-8387-5346-9). Gann provides a detailed analysis of the piece, including a complete list of the harmonics employed. From this I was able to easily produce a rendering of the Romantic Symmetry using Csound. Once I was able to actually hear it, I was inspired to write something that would explore some of the intervallic combinations embodied in the material of the piece. I wanted to refract the multicolored light of Young’s chord into a revolving mobile, to provide an additional way of hearing it. The result is the work presented here.

In the title Symmetrical Melodic Variation, I’m using the term “melodic” in the sense that matches my understanding of Young’s use of the term, in that the tonal materials are used horizontally rather than vertically. By “symmetrical,” I mean that I am deliberately working with the intervallic/registral symmetry inherent in Young’s arrangement of pitches. The drone note, the 127th harmonic, is the axis of symmetry in Young’s chord. I divided the remaining pitches into three “registers”. Of the four moving voices, the bottom one uses the lower seven pitches, the middle two voices use the central nine pitches minus the 127 axis, and the top voice uses the upper six pitches. Each voice uses step-wise motion, beginning and ending at the same pitch within its series. Each voice uses notes of equal duration, but each register is at a slightly different speed, so that they all start and end at the same time. The end result is that each voice, and thus the entire piece, is melodically and rhythmically symmetrical — in fact, each voice is a palindrome, which is reflected in the new title. All of the pitches used in the Romantic Symmetry are present in this piece, and there are no additional pitches added.

For the original version of the piece, I made an instrument that combines a simulation of a plucked string (using Csound’s pluck opcode) with a simple oscillator tone. I did not use a pure sine wave except for the central drone, but the other tones use relatively pure waveforms consisting of the first partial with different strengths of the 2nd, 4th, and 8th partials; since these are all octaves of the fundamental, the pitch ratios remain unmuddied.

In the revised version of the piece, I removed the pluck sound and used a simple oscillator tone. All the voices are now pure sines, except for the lowest voice, in which I added a bit of the second partial to balance it better against the higher-pitched voices. The other big change was to use a different type of reverb, using the Csound babo (“BAll-within-the-BOx”) opcode. The cool thing about this reverb is that it allows one to specify the exact dimensions of the virtual room, and well as the three-dimensional placement, within that room, of the sound source. I decided to use a room size that was a multiple of the wavelength of the fundamental frequency (7.5 Hz), to get a “tuned” resonant reverberation. I also chose to make a two-stage reverberator, where the output of the first fed into input of the second.

I am indebted to Kyle Gann, without whose writings I could not have even begun to study and explore areas of La Monte Young’s work which would otherwise have been inaccessible to me.

Notes on the Revision

I decided to revise this piece for two reasons.

First, I wasn’t really satisfied with the sound of the piece (the plucked sound was too harsh, and there was not enough “spaciousness” in the overall sound). I made the individual timbres simpler but took a different approach to overall texture over time by putting the sound within a much more resonant (virtual) space — see the penultimate paragraph in the previous section for details.

Second, I wrote this before I realized that it would become part of a series (it is the first of three, continuing with The Gemini Nebula and concluding with Passacaglia and Fugue State). After completing the other two, I felt the need to go back and make this one more consistent with the others. More specifically, I wanted simpler timbres and a greater emphasis on beating patterns and combination tones from massed sonorities. The new title is more consistent with the other pieces as well, in that it is hopefully a little more evocative and less prosaic.

Thanks to Torsten Anders for his comments.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

Tags

just intonation, la monte young

Passacaglia and Fugue State

Posted 6 March 2005, 21:56

Description

An electronic work inspired by La Monte Young’s sine-tone installation 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.

Written and realized with Scala, blue, and Csound.

Dedicated to La Monte Young in his 70th year.

Duration: 10 minutes 45 seconds.

Background & Technical Details

This is the third and final piece in what has become a series inspired by La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations, following Symmetrical Melodic Variation on the Romantic Symmetry and The Gemini Nebula.

I used Scala to build a 31-note microtonal “scale” based on the complete set of unique pitches in Young’s The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry, in essence recasting Young’s carefully-selected group of prime-numbered harmonics as generalized interval ratios rather than absolute multiples of a fundamental. This allowed me to use the pitches in any register — similar to the strategy I used in The Gemini Nebula. However, whereas in the latter piece I kept everything constrained to the range of a single octave, in this piece I use a broader registral pallette (though not as broad as Young’s).

The piece consists of four layers:

a set of five drones on 1/1, 9/8 and 7/4, using the Risset harmonic arpeggio effect to sound slightly tamboura-like;
a sort of obbligato built from two complex waveforms that together encode the cluster of harmonics at the registral “center” of Young’s piece, using a much slower version of the Risset effect to create a sort of looping cascade that sounds almost like intersecting glissandi;
a repeating three-note bass motif: 1/1, 7/4, 9/8, …;
a sine-wave “chorale” on 12 pitches within the range of an octave, starting as two voices diverging in pitch, then slowly gathering into a cluster containing all 12 notes plus two more, creating complex binaural beating patterns.

The piece starts with the drone, then adds the obbligato, then the bass motif, and finally the chorale, which builds in intensity and density almost until the end, when suddenly only the done remains to fade out.

The title comes from the repeating bass motif, which reminded me of one of my favorite musical forms, the passacaglia. The rest of the title is, of course, a joke. At the same time, I hope that the piece has a kind of ambient hallucinatory quality, so the phrase fugue state seemed appropriate.

Thanks yet again to Kyle Gann for his article in Sound and Light, without which I could not have embarked on this project.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

Tags

drones, just intonation, la monte young

The Gemini Nebula

Posted 31 January 2005, 06:38

Description

A variation on La Monte Young’s The Prime Time Twins in the Ranges 576 to 448; 144 to 112; 72 to 56; 36 to 28; with the Range Limits 576, 448, 288, 224, 144, 56, and 28. An electronic piece written and realized with Scala, blue, and Csound.

Dedicated to La Monte Young in his 70th year.

Duration: 7 minutes 30 seconds.

Background & Technical Details

Young’s Prime Time Twins is one of his continuous sine-tone installations. The twins of the title refer to pairs of numbers called “twin primes”: prime numbers that have a difference of two, such as 137 and 139. Young treats the set of twin primes listed in his title as overtones above a subsonic fundamental at 7.5 Hz. The piece consists of these ten pairs of pitches, which cover a five octave range, combined with seven other pitches (multiples of the seventh and ninth partials, the “range limits” of the title). The fundamental does not appear in any octave, but is implied by the resulting combination tones.

In preparing for my piece, I converted the PTT numbers into ratios, essentially reducing them to intervals within a single octave. Then I used Scala to gather these ratios, along with 9/8 and 7/4, into a “scale” (linked below). The fascinating thing when one considers the notes in this way is that it reveals very clearly that the PTTs are grouped into two tight clusters or ranges at the high and low ends of an octave: five pairs are located between 1/1 and 9/8, and the other five pairs are located between 7/4 and 2/1. Here is a table of the PTT “scale”, in ascending pitch order:

Ratio	Cents	Interval
1/1	0.000	unison
521/512	30.167	521-523 twins
523/512	36.801	521-523 twins
269/256	85.755	269-271 twins
271/256	98.579	269-271 twins
137/128	117.638	137-139 twins
139/128	142.729	137-139 twins
281/256	161.312	281-283 twins
283/256	173.590	281-283 twins
569/512	182.742	569-571 twins
571/512	188.816	569-571 twins
9/8	203.910	major whole tone
7/4	968.826	harmonic seventh
227/128	991.858	227-229 twins
229/128	1007.045	227-229 twins
461/256	1018.348	461-463 twins
463/256	1025.842	461-463 twins
29/16	1029.577	bottom of 29-31 twins
59/32	1059.172	bottom of 59-61 twins
239/128	1081.040	239-241 twins
241/128	1095.467	239-241 twins
61/32	1116.885	top of 59-61 twins
31/16	1145.036	top of 29-31 twins
2/1	1200.000	octave

In my piece, I use all of these pitches within the octave that starts at 240 Hz. The 1/1 and 2/1 are used as drones, as are 9/8 and 7/4, together serving as what Young calls range limits. The other tones enter gradually from low to high within the limits, and then gradually leave. As the texture thickens, the beating between tones forms a complex rhythmic pattern. Each pair of twins is played in stereo, with the pair members on opposite sides, which adds the element of binaural beating. All of the tones are simple sine waves, and no effects are used. The piece was composed using Steven Yi’s excellent program blue, which allowed me to work directly with the PTT scale I made in Scala.

The title The Gemini Nebula has several derivations. Gemini, of course, is a reference to twins. I used the word nebula because one of the effects produced by the piece reminds me of the “clouds” in the piano music of Young and Michael Harrison, but since I recently used the word “cloud” for another piece, I decided to use a related word. (By the way, it turns out that there really is an astronomical object called the Gemini Nebula.)

As with my previous piece that takes off from one of La Monte Young’s sine-tone works, I relied on Kyle Gann’s article “The Outer Edge of Consonance: Snapshots from the Evolution of La Monte Young’s Tuning Installations”.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

MP3 (18MB)
blue project (text, 11KB)
Csound unified score file (text, 2KB)
Scala Prime Time Twins scale (text, 307B)

Tags

drones, just intonation, la monte young

Drone Instrument - Sruti Box

Posted 8 January 2005, 13:28

Update, 12-September-2010

There is now a new improved version, please go HERE for more information.

Description

A realtime Csound instrument with a graphical interface, intended for use in live performance with other instruments (acoustic and/or electronic). For use with CsoundAV (and Csound5, once it is released).

Features:

One to four voices
Tunable base pitch by frequency
Each voice tunable as a ratio plus an octave displacement relative to the base pitch
Nine selectable waveforms (1 sine, 2 sawtooth, 2 square, 2 prime, 2 Fibonacci)
Optional Risset harmonic arpeggio effect
Built-in reverb

Performance Notes

The are four drones, each one arranged in a column. The button at the top turns the drone on or off. The two controls belows the on/off button are the numerator and denominator that specify the tuning ratio for the drone. For example, for the interval 2/1 (octave), set the upper control to 2 and the lower one to 1. The small arrow changes the setting by 1; the double arraw changes the setting by 10. The ratio control will accept any whole number up to 1500.

The next control down sets the octave displacement of the drone relative to the base pitch: 0 means that the drone is in the same octave as the base pitch, 1 means one octave up, -1 means one octave down, etc. Under the octave control is a “mute” switch, so that you can exclude one or more drones, which is useful if you want to turn them on or off as a group.

In the middle is control that sets the frequency of the base pitch against which the drones are tuned. The single arrow moves in increments of .05 Hz; the double arrow is in increments of 5 Hz. (If you would like a version with finer-grained control, let me know.)

The next set of buttons selects the waveform that will be used by all the drones. See the next section for details.

The bottom row contains the Play and Stop buttons, which turn all (unmuted) drones on or off, respectively.

Finally, the Harmonic arpeggio control activates the Risset effect that is described in the next section.

Background & Technical Details

Since I don’t own or have regular access to a tamboura, and have been dissatisfied so far with the reed-and-bellows or electronic sruti boxes I’ve tried, I decided to make one of my own. As a student of just intonation, I decided to make the drones tunable using ratios. The default settings match one of the typical tamboura tunings: 1/1 (Sa), 3/2 (Pa), 2/1 (Sa’), 2/1 (Sa’), but of course you are free to use whatever ratios you wish. For example, a very nice set of ratios incorporating the septimal seventh is 1/1, 3/2, 7/4, 2/1. Or replace the 2/1 with a septimal whole tone (8/7) or a major whole tone (9/8). The possibilities are endless.

I’ve included a range of waveforms. The sawtooth and square waves are probably the closest to most existing electronic sruti boxes. The “prime” wave is a waveform built up prime-numbered partials through 23; the “Fibonacci” wave is built up from partials in the Fibonacci sequence through 89. The sawtooth, square, prime and Fibonacci waves have two variants each. In the first instance of each wave, the strengths of the partials are calculated as 1/n (where n is the partial number). The alternative versions use the formula 1/n + 1/(n-1), which results in slightly richer harmonic content.

The optional Risset harmonic arpeggio effect is a technique discovered by the pioneering electronic composer Jean-Claude Risset. By combining an oscillator with eight other oscillators at slight frequency offsets, a complex interference pattern is created that sweeps through the component harmonics of the original waveform. This is the best way I’ve found so far to produce a sound that suggests the characteristic buzzing sound of a tamboura string.

I will likely revise this instrument over time with different effects, waveforms, and controls, possibly even a “rhythmic” version that simulates a plucked tamboura. I am certainly open to suggestions, so please add a comment to this page or send me email if you have any ideas, requests, or bug reports.

This is dedicated to Art Hunkins, from whom I have been learning a lot about realtime Csound, including some techniques that greatly improved the design of this instrument.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

Csound unified score file (text, 14KB)

Tags

drones, just intonation, sruti box

Cloud Dragon

Posted 7 December 2004, 17:56

Description

A live electronic piece; a series of swelling sustained chords built from the combination tones resulting from just-tuned dyads, over an optional drone.

Duration: variable. Requires a performer, a PC, one or two banks of eight continuous MIDI controllers (optional) and certain versions of Csound (see below for details).

Realized for live performance by Art Hunkins.

Background & Technical Details

This is a live-performance (i.e., real-time) Csound piece based on Combination Study 1, made in collaboration with Art Hunkins. It was Art’s idea to transform CS1 into a live piece. I did a little work on the visual appearance, and came up with some ideas for opening up the possibilities of the piece, but Art is responsible for all the hard work of designing and coding the performance arrangements, as well as writing the performance notes — he really drove this project. There are several different versions of the piece included, as explained in the performance notes, excerpted below:

There are three major versions of Cloud Dragon – indicated as v1, v2, and v3. They differ by performance instrumentation: v1 uses only computer mouse and monitor; v2 requires a bank of 8 MIDI (continuous) controllers – either pots or sliders; v3 requires 12 (or 14) controllers, configured as a bank of 8 and a bank of 4 (or 6).

There are three variants of each version as well – indicated as a, b, and c. Variant a is the most basic, offering preset Chord Ratios; its fixed six-chord sequence (and suggested performance order) is 8/5, 7/5, 6/5, 7/6, 9/8 and 5/4; eight-chord sequences add a final 4/3 and 3/2.

Variant b allows the performer to select his/her own Chord Ratios; the choices (numerator and denominator) are integers between 1 and 1500. Default settings are the fixed ones indicated above. In addition, the performer can select a single Chord-to-Drone Root Ratio – a kind of global transposition factor for all chords. (Default is 1/1 – no transposition.) Again, integers up to 1500 are allowed in numerator and denominator. All these ratios may be varied during performance, but doing so is not encouraged. Any change takes place with the following chord.

Variant c permits the performer, in addition to the above, to specify Chord-to-Drone Root Ratios independently for each chord (all defaults, 1/1). This variant encourages you to explore the wide-open possibilities of tuning systems referenced by Dave Seidel on his Combination Study 1 webpage (see above).

Versions 3b and 3c have the highest degree of flexibility and will hopefully be interesting and fun for anyone who would like to experiment in realtime with complex ratios that are not necessarily anchored to the “root” (1/1) established by the drone.

Because this is a live performance piece that employs a graphical user interface, only certain versions of Csound are suitable. See the performance notes (available below as a separate download) for details.

For more information on the underlying musical/acoustical concepts, see the notes for Combination Study 1. The title comes from an image I get when listening to the piece: a winged serpent weaving in and out of the tops of the clouds, sinuous and gleaming in the sun.

My sincere thanks to Art Hunkins for envisioning this project and making it happen. “Cloud Dragon” is also listed on his site, along with some of Art’s other compositions (electronic and otherwise, most of them realtime), which are lovely and well worth checking out.

Copyright & Licensing

Files

Performance notes (text, 8KB)
Csound unified score files and performance notes (zip, 42KB)

Tags

art hunkins, collaborations, combination tones, just intonation, midi, realtime

Combination Study 1

Posted 24 October 2004, 12:23

Description

Over a bed of sruti-box-like drones, a slow chord sequence plays through twice, first in closed voicing, then in open voicing. Best listened to with headphones.

Duration: 8 minutes, 5 seconds.

Background & Technical Details

This piece was inspired by a section of David B. Doty’s excellent book The Just Intonation Primer. Chapter 2, “Acoustic and Psychoacoustic Background”, pages 17-19, discusses the phenomena of difference tones, summation tones (collectively referred to as “combination tones”) and the periodicity pitch. I won’t get into a detailed description of these terms, but essentially they describe pitches that are synthesized by our ears and/or by our higher-order neural processing in response to hearing a set of two or more simultaneous tones. These tones are not always perceivable by the listener, but are theoretically always present, or at least potential.

When I read this part of the book, I was fascinated by Figures 2.10 (page 17) and 2.11 (page 18) which show in musical notation the chords that emerge from certain simple-ratio intervals when these combination tones are perceived. I decided to make a Csound instrument that, given an interval, would produce a chord consisting of the original dyad plus its derived combination tones. My initial motivation was to simply make these chords audible with properly-tuned intervals (not possible on my equal-tempered keyboard), but when I heard the results, I decided to write something using these materials.

The instrument I eventually came up with (instr 2 in the Csound score), takes as input a starting pitch and a ratio (which together describe the base dyad) and computes an eight-note chord consisting of the dyad plus three difference tones (first-, second-, and third-order), two summation tones (first- and second-order), and the periodicity pitch. Of course, for a given dyad, the resulting combinations tones are not always unique, so there are not always eight distinct pitches. A chord based on an interval smaller than an octave will generally cover a wide range (i.e., it’s in an open voicing), but I wanted to be able to hear what a close voicing version would sound like, so I added the capability of “reducing” the chord such that all the tones could be transposed as necessary to be restricted to a given interval, such as an octave. The chord sequence in this piece is played in close voicing the first time, and in open (or natural) voicing the second time. I also added a little flanging to “fatten” the sound.

The chord sequence in the piece is based on a series of simple-ratio intervals, all except one (9/8) taken directly from the Doty figures. The complete set of ratios used (in the order in which they appear) are 8/5, 7/5, 6/5, 7/6, 9/8, and 5/4.

The drone in the background is based on an instrument I found in the Amsterdam Catalog of Csound Computer Instruments v1.2, which implements Risset’s design for a harmonic arpeggio. The drone consists of four instances of this instrument on the pitches 1/1, 3/2, 2/1, 2/1 (tonic, fifth, tonic+8ve).

The entire piece is based on a root frequency of 60Hz. If I were to make a “European” version, I would base it on 50Hz (you can do this yourself by commented out line 256 in the score, and uncommenting line 259).

I wrote the piece with Csound version 4.23f12 (the “canonical” version), using the 64-bit Windows executable. The piece renders fine in real time, at least on my machine (try this yourself by uncommenting line 19 and commenting out line 20 in the score).