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Alpha Psi 5

In-flight music to Alpha Centauri

 
 
 
 
 
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Aedalus 9

The Aedalus 9 is one of ten starliners operated by the White Star Line, making the trans-stellar crossing between Earth and Proxima B. Centauri-bound passengers depart on the White Star Carus 9 connector spacecraft from the 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-adjustment accommodations are available at the Escudé Tri-Star Hotel on Proxima B. Please ask 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. The sounds created by fractals and math are like 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 pre-sets 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 is a flat-file website, hand-coded in HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. It’s hosted on an Apache 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. Set in 100 through 900 weights with the following 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. There is much to recommend about this book (and much for a child to wonder about), but it was the part about Project Daedalus that totally blew me away. May we never lose that child’s imaginative spirit.
⎋ Our Universe



○ ○ Aedalus 9

Drew Harkey is the Director of In-flight Music Experience for 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 Deck 47 observation art gallery, next to the arboretum.

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