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Alpha Psi 5

In-flight music to Alpha Centauri

Drew Harkey

Drew Harkey disambiguation
(a converstation with AI)

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I am Drew Harkey, Andrew David Harkey, a multimedia artist who lives in Florida. I experiment with imagery and sound. This is my website, which is an integrated portfolio of my sound-based artistic works, music experiments, sonoetic waveforms, and atmospheric soundscapes. This interactive art project is presented as a fictional travel brochure for starliner passengers on an interstellar voyage.

Image of Image of Drew Harkey: man with brown eyes and brown hair wearing a black shirt standing in a museum gallery
Drew Harkey

There are several persons named Drew Harkey and/or Andrew Harkey in the United States.

  • I am Drew Harkey, Andrew David Harkey, a multimedia artist who lives in Florida. This is my website, which includes my sound-based artistic work (music and soundscapes) that explore the interplay between sound, light, and perception. I do not have a Facebook profile, nor do I have any other social media presence.
  • There is another Drew Harkey based in Charlotte North Carolina. He owns a window cleaning business. His full name is Andrew James Harkey. He has a Facebook profile. He was an actor in the film Late One Night. He passed away on November 21, 2017, at his home in Charlotte after an extended illness. He is not me.
  • There is a student named Drew Harkey who attends Staley High School in Missouri. He is talented with sports and robotics. He is not me.
  • There is a musician named Andrew Harkey that is based in Texas. He has also served as a Committee Clerk for the Texas House Committee on Higher Education. He is not me.
 
 
 
 
 
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Aedalus 9

The Aedalus 9 is one of ten starliners making the trans-stellar crossing between Earth and Proxima B for the White Star Line. Centauri-bound passengers depart on the Carus 9 connector spacecraft from Earth’s Singapore orbital dock, and accelerate smoothly to the rendezvous with the Aedalus 9 as it passes through the heliopause. Your voyage will take seven months along the interstellar cycler.

Gravity-adjustments and accommodations are available at the Escudé Tri-Star Hotel on Proxima B. See your White Star concierge for details.

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waypoints on the Interstellar Cycler

image of musical notes and colors completing a circuit

The Interstellar Cycler. The exterior circuit of the interstellar cycler correlates with the notes of the octave as it ascends in perfect fifths. In the figure above, the bottom cycle of the loop flows through the whole tones, and the top loop through the half tones. The interior circuit (the connections that makes the star shape) corresponds to the notes of the octave as they appear in ascending order through an equal temperament scale. Each note on the 12-tone octave then invokes a hue from the 12-color CMY/RGB color wheel, the half tones represented by the 5 primary colors of the subtractive scale, and the natural notes by the 7 remaining secondary colors.

This diagram is built upon the work of Hans Erhard Lauer’s Circle of Seven whole tones, Circle of Five half tones found in Die Entwicklung der Musik im Wandel der Tonsysteme (The Evolution of Music Through Changes in Tone-Systems), 1935, revised ed. 1960, reissued Basel, Verlag die Pforte, 1976.

 

about the sounds

Physical Modeling Synthesis. Most of the sounds heard in these compositions are waveforms constructed on my computer through the synthesis of mathematical models, known as physical modeling synthesis. This should not be confused with AI, which is a predictive algorithm based on aggregated (often stolen) data. Instead, these sounds are created with fractals and math — sonic elements pre-existing, a priori, in the universe, waiting to be discovered.

With physical modeling I can explore these parameters of timbre, texture and microtonality beyond the limits of both sampling and analog instrumentation, finding new color tones and sonic pigments, and experimenting with early musical modalities.

Modeling Synthesis Software.

  • Bitwig 4.2.5 Phase-4
  • Bitwig 4.2.5 Polymer
  • Bitwig 4.2.5 Polysynth
  • Bitwig 4.2.5 Poly Grid
  • Tracktion BioTek 2.1.7 and 2.2.8
  • Dawesome Abyss 1.2.0
  • Pianoteq 8.1.3
  • AAS Ultra Analog 3.3.3
  • AAS Chromaphone 3.1.5
  • AAS String Studio 3.2.3
  • KNIF Audio Knifonium
  • DS Audio Tantra 2
  • Arturia Augmented 1.1.0
  • Bitwig 4.2.5 Sampler (sampler)
  • Orchestral Tools (samples)
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Modeling Foundations.
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 physical modeling presets 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
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Analog Antecedents. Some of the physical models I’ve built are based on some real-world 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.



 

website colophon

Code. This website is hand-coded by Drew Harkey in HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. It’s hosted on Digital Ocean server.

  • The audio player is built with modifications from:
    ⎋ jPlayer
  • For the splash animation, I modified:
    ⎋ Vegas

Privacy and cookies. To make improvements to the website — and to find errors — I use a privacy-aligned analytics tool called Clicky to log and analyze web traffic. I don’t use any other cookies, and do not monitor any cookies from other websites you’ve visited before arriving here. That is to say, I use Clicky in an anonymized way, with no personal data being logged. You may review Clicky’s privacy policy.
⎋ Clicky

Typography. The text is set in 100 to 900 weights with these typefaces:
⎋ Gogh
⎋ Virgo 01

Theme. The interstellar spaceliner theme for this project is inspired by a favorite book of mine from the 4th grade, Our Universe by Roy Gallant, published by the National Geographic Society. Though there is much to recommend about this book (and much for a child to wonder about), it was the part about Project Daedalus that totally blew me away. May we never lose our inner child’s imaginative spirit.
⎋ Our Universe

AI Statement. The photos are real, the words are human, the music is played. The outcome takes effort. No generative AI.

A man goes to the village smith to have a lute built for himself. After the instrument has been completed, the man declares that the lute will not play. The smith answers, This is a wooden thing. As long as it has no heart and experience, it cannot sing. It is you who must give it a heart and experience. The wood must go into battle on your back. The wood must echo with the sword blow. The wood must soak up the dripping blood: blood of your blood, breath of your breath. Its pain must become your pain and its fame your fame.
— adapted from Marius Schneider, Acoustic Symbolism in Foreign Cultures.



○ ○ Aedalus 9

Drew Harkey is the Director of In-flight Experience for music channel Alpha Psi 5 aboard the Aedalus 9 starliner, signal accessible through your standard onboard cabin console. Nightly interactive performances are also available for Centauri Stateroom passengers in the observation art gallery on Deck 47, next to the arboretum.

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