This interactive art project is presented in the form of a philosophical inquiry, which positions the musical soundforms as an analogue to the ineffable metaphysical experience,
a form of knowing beyond the constraints of words. This is perhaps an ancient idea that goes back to Pythagoras and finds a more modern rational justification in Wittgenstein.
The technical approach to this project is a departure from the standard A440 equal temperament scale, experimenting with microtonality and alternative intonations.
About Drew Harkey
This section is Drew Harkey disambiguation (in conversation with AI). Skip to main content.
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 a portfolio of my sound-based artistic works, integrated music experiments, sonoetic exhibitions, and atmospheric soundscapes.
Much of it can be described as psy-ambient.
Drew Harkey
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long-form psyambient microtonal compositions
soundforms
Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Everything owes its existence solely and completely to sound. — Peter Guy Manners
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artist
statement
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The philosophy of our postmodernist era asserts that our reality is solely shaped by our language,
that our experience is limited by our vocabulary, that our understanding is reduced to only what is expressible.
Yet, experience shows us, not all that can be known can be put into words. In certain fleeting, ineffable moments we have understanding.
There is not a name for everything.
— Jodey Castricano Gothic Metaphysics
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Poised in that realm between the expressible and the ineffable is music —
the ordering of sound in time — something we experience as different from noise.
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
— Leonard Bernstein The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, 1976
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Down there, at the level of quantum strings, it can be said everything is completely music.
Perhaps then music is an analogue, a portal into that liminal space between the duality of understanding and discovery.
I shall call to mind how music was always celebrated and held sacred among the ancients,
and how very sage philosophers were of the opinion that the world is composed of music,
that the heavens make harmony in their moving, and that the soul, being ordered in like fashion,
awakes and as it were revives its powers through music.
— Ludovico da Canossa (1475-1532) in Baldassare Castiglione’sThe Courtier, 1528
about the
compositions
Visualizing sonic symmetry.
There is much discussion these days about investigating the golden ratio in music, and most of the focus is arguing about the frequency (the Hz) of the notes.
But I propose that the golden ratio is not found in the frequencies that create the notes, it’s in the intervals between the notes.
That’s because equal temperament creates an artificial circle of fifths. Left alone,
in pure Pythagorean terms, the intervals would instead create a spiral of fifths, a Fibonacci shape.
The above graphs takes this spiral concept and imposes it on a 2-D diagram to illustrate the relationships. The exterior circuit of cycle correlates with the notes of the octave as it ascends in
perfect fifths. 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 the just intonation scale.
Each note on the 12-tone octave then invokes a hue from the 12-color CMY/RGB color wheel (just for fun, because 12 notes in a scale, 12 colors on a color wheel),
where the half tones are represented by the 5 primary colors of the subtractive scale, and the natural notes by the 7 remaining secondary colors.
This diagram is an expansion 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 basically a re-mix of stored data through predictive algorithms.
Instead, these sounds are created with fractals and math — sonic elements pre-existing, a priori, in the universe, waiting to be discovered (poetically speaking).
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 earlier 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)
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
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Code.
This website is hand-coded by Drew Harkey in HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. It’s hosted on Digital Ocean server.
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
⎋ Gogh
the legible text
⎋ Sigali
the illegible script
AI Statement.
The photos are real, the words are human, the music is played, the effort is the point. 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.
