There is a mystery at the confluence of science and mind, at the intersection 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 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 band 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
I. Aragonite
a walk in the fog
the color of greyish white
A short reverie composed for a string ensemble of viola, cello and bass. The viola plays flageolet to convey a sense of strain and wandering, and
the melody line is actually a weave of textures. The chord arrangement progresses through a feeling of searching — perhaps a bit of longing —
and resolves in a closed, positive cadence.
posted January 06, 2023
II. Quicksilver
an interweaving fugue state
a fleeting glint of light
This is the first composition where my goal of creating emergence is explicit rather than inferred.
I believe there are sounds “heard” in the piece that are not programmed or played by an instrument.
They are instead created by the interference of the waves, in the mind of the listener,
an aural illusion much in the same way the color
magenta is visual illusion. The effect is most pronounced in the second half, as the weaving
sine waves interact with the “trance choir.” Creating the effect was an accident: I was trying to
overcome a timing issue of quantization that was creating digital artifacts, and loosening the precision created the “tranciness” of the repeating waveforms.
And out of that emerged a sort of U-sequence of implied sounds.
posted January 06, 2023
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, including:
Currier piano (1959)
Seasoned to a mellow resonance after years in an open-air living room of my home
— the bay breeze coming through the Florida jalousie windows — a touch of sea salt in its felt.
Woods guitar (2009)
I bought it in Montana, then hand-tuned it to the sounds of the Lochsa River in the Clearwater National Forest,
and allowed it to detune gracefully where I recorded it in the Puget Sound.