Sonoetics | Everything is Completely Sound

everything is
completely sound

There is a mystery at the intersection of mind and matter, at the confluence where the world 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 underlies it all.

This project aims to explore that delicate, dynamic realm found at the margins of order and chaos, entropy and emergence, the material and the imaginal.

Poised in that narrow space between the repetitive and the unpredictable is music — a peculiar ordering of sound in time — something we experience as different from noise.

Down there, at the level of quantum strings, it can be said everything is completely sound. Perhaps then music is an analogue, a portal into that liminal space between the duality of waves and particles.

From strings above, to strings below.

about the compositions

These musical ideas are what I imagine white light sounds like as it passes through the liquid of glass, the interaction of waves through waves, of starlight and sound and matter.

The resulting sonic alchemy is sometimes intentional, sometimes aleatoric, and always with the aim of creating a harmonic resonance, of evoking tones heard that are not explicitly played by an instrument, created instead in the mind of the listener by the interference patterns of the soundwaves themselves.

In the duality of the material and the imaginal.

about the sounds

Physical Modeling Synthesis.
Most of the sounds created in these works are original waveforms constructed on my computer with mathematical models.^[1]

With physical modeling I can explore the parameters of timbre, texture and microtonality beyond the limits of both sampling and analog instrumentation, working to invent new color tones and sonic pigments while maintaining references to earlier modalities.

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 foundations 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

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.

the color of Sound

The Color of Sound ^[3]
The exterior circuit of the loop follows the notes of the octave as it ascends in perfect fifths. The bottom cycle flows through the whole tones, and the top through the half tones. The interior circuit (that makes the star shape) follows the notes of the octave as they appear in ascending order through an equal temperament scale. Each note on the 12-tone octave then corresponds to a hue on 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 created by the primary palette.

notes

^[1] The sounds created by fractals and math are like sonic elements pre-existing, a priori, in the universe, waiting to be discovered. This process not be confused with AI, which is only a predictive algorithm based on stored data. If you’re wondering, I don’t use AI for the creation of music (or imagery, writing or code). Art is a practice, not a product, and the inspirare is in the imagination, not in imitation.

^[2] The Color of Sound was built upon the work of Hans Erhard Lauer. I used a wireframe of the “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.