Manifold Voices live at ISSUE Project Room

Tedb0t — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:50:29 +0000

Last Tuesday at ISSUE Project Room I performed a new experimental music piece titled “Manifold Voices:”

Thanks so much to my players: Jessie Shaffer, Henry Bigelow, and Matt Boyle. Read on for lots more information on the piece.

“Manifold Voices” is a musical work for violins and function generators. The function generators—electronic lab equipment for generating simple signals—utilize a graphic score that Matt and I interpreted live. Here are the first three pages:

The score for the function generators consists of a curve denoting amplitude over time. Pitches are indicated numerically in Hertz, and occasionally arrows indicate glissandi. As you can see, it was continuously revised during rehearsals. The function generators drove two independent speakers, which were mic’d and run into guitar pedals (an Akai Headrush and a multi-effects bank, respectively), then into Ableton Live on a laptop for delay and reverb, and then into the house mixer.

“Manifold Voices” grew out of two intersecting developments: drone music I had been working on with the function generators (the technological side) and research in musical tuning systems (the theoretical side). Since the function generators afford the use of specific frequency values, I decided to attempt to write this piece using a Pythagorean tuning system, where the fifth interval is a perfect 3/2 harmonic ratio. Toward this end I developed a simple PureData patch to automatically generate the frequency values for the diatonic scale. The violins were tuned down to match note values derived from a fundamental frequency of 250hz. More details to come…

You Were Alive

Tedb0t — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:29:03 +0000

Using a function generator, a busted speaker and a mic, I recorded this drone piece, “You Were Alive:”

Here’s a making-of video that should illuminate the process:

You Will Not Be There

Tedb0t — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:10:14 +0000

This is a 12-tone piece for piano and synthesizer. I used the soundingstone.net tone-row generator to get these sets based off an A-Db-E triad:

The piece consists of three sections that use the rows P(0), RI(8) + P(9), and P(2) + RI(2) in different ways, sometimes the entire row, sometimes just 3 or 4 notes from the row in an arpeggio.

Here is the same piece as analyzed and manipulated through SPEAR:

Limina.Log » Visual Music

Manifold Voices live at ISSUE Project Room

You Were Alive

You Will Not Be There