everything is completely Sound

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’s The Courtier, 1528

There is a mystery at the intersection of science and mind, in the confluence where matter 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 underly it all.

This 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 — that 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 structure and waves — reaching through the mirror of our consciousness and expressing the non-verbal, non-linear possibilities of the human mind.

From strings above, to strings below.

notes

Phosphorescence
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 night sky arcs above, the tiny beings at my feet seem to be in conversation with the moonlight shimmering on the sea.















everything is
completely sound

Each music experiment here is structured within a “genre.” I totally made up the names of these genres, because I don’t want to impose any established expectations on the listener, but at the same time I do want to provide a helpful heuristic to place the piece in its tone and style.

Psinewave
These are minimal-beats synthesizer waveforms spiced with analog instruments or their physical model equivalents.

Tranceform
Beat-free, tempo-free atmospheres that lose track of space and time. Musical meditations.

Postjazz
Minimal to light beats that are tempo driven, operate within the jazz-chord mode, and contain a melodic line.

Spacecraft
Moderate beats that emerge from the psy and ambient galaxies, sometimes (but not always) with a defined melodic line. Consider it in-flight music to Alpha Centauri.



acknowledgements

Physical Modeling
Most of the sounds created in these works are original waveforms constructed on my computer with mathematical models, known as physical modeling. The art of building complex waveforms can be a genre in its own right, and I would like to thank the following artists and sound designers who have created 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
Andrew Skelton
Joerg Huettner
Taiho Yamada
Vincent Gagnon
Thiago Pinheiro
David Kristian
Michel Basque
Ed Ten Eyck
Gautam

Forked Samples
In the parlance of computer programming, a fork is a derivation of source code, often taking the original in new directions, and sometimes altering the source in unrecognizable ways. The following artists generously offered their immense talents for some of the analog mapping used in these works, and I hope I’ve retained the spirit of their artistry. Farida Rustamova, violin
Aleksey Igudesman, violin
Alejandro Regueira, viola
Vasily Bystoff, cello
Charlie Clouser, percussion
Lara Ausensi, vocals

Analog Instruments
Some analog instrument physical models I built are based on real-world 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.

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