Sonoetics

everything is
completely sound

There is a mystery at the intersection of matter and mind, at the confluence where substance is both a wave and a particle. A place where reality depends on how we observe it — where the structure of the world “out there” may be only an allegory of the strange loops, recursions and self-mirroring that underlies it all.

This music project aims to explore that delicate, dynamic realm found at the margins of chaos and order, entropy and coherence, the imaginal and the material.

Poised in that narrow space between the repetitive and the unpredictable is music — a peculiar ordering of sound in time — something we experience as different from random noise.

Down there, at the level of quantum strings, it can be said everything is completely sound. Perhaps then music is an analogue, an ontological portal into that liminal space between the duality of particles and waves.

From strings above, to strings below.

Physical Modeling
Most of the sounds created in these works are original waveforms constructed on my computer with mathematical models, known as physical modeling synthesis. Each note I play is created in real-time based on the velocity and gesture I make with the hardware, preserving the kinetic and sonic experience of playing a physical instrument. Unlike digital sampling, the interaction is closer to playing an analog piano, for example, rather than playing a recording (sample) of somebody else playing the piano.

With physical modeling I can explore the parameters of timbre, texture and microtonality outside the limits of both sampling and analog instrumentation, working to invent new color tones and sonic pigments that express the human experience.

That said, no man is an island. Because building complex waveforms can be an art in its own right, I would like to thank the following artists and sound designers who have created some foundational constructions from which I was inspired to fork my own versions. Richard Devine
Daniel Stawczyk
Christian Laffitte
Laurence Rapaccioli (Arksun)
Alessandro Cardinale
Christian Halten
Dave Linnenbank
Joerg Huettner
Taiho Yamada
Adam Pietruszko
Thiago Pinheiro
Klaus Baetz
Vincent Gagnon
Gautam

Analog Instruments
Some of the physical models I’ve built are based on some analog instruments I’ve owned, including: Currier piano (1959)
Seasoned to a mellow resonance after years in an open-air living room — the bay breeze coming through the Florida jalousie windows — a touch of sea salt in its hammer felt.
Woods guitar (2009)
I bought it in Montana and hand-tuned it to the sounds of the Lochsa River in the Clearwater National Forest, then allowed it to detune gracefully where I recorded it in the Puget Sound.

places

Bioluminence
Fort DeSoto Beach, Tierra Verde, Florida At night, in the dark waters of the Gulf, when the conditions are just right, the lapping waves along the submerged ruins of “The Rocks” at Fort DeSoto pulse in an ethereal yellow glow from millions of microscopic bioluminescent algae just below the surface of the water. As the starry sky arcs above, the tiny beings at my feet seem to be in conversation with the moonlight, shimmering on the sea.