GRM Tools 3.3 - the review

My review of GRM Tools 3.3 has just been published in Wusik Sound Magazine.  For those who came in late, GRM Tools are a fabulous bunch of plugins, each of which has been conceived compositionally (as opposed to simply implementing a function), which offer a lot of potential to folks in search of sound modifications.  You can read the whole issue of Wusik Sound Magazine on-line at http://www.wusik.com/ww/products/wusik-magazine.  My review is in the current (August 2012) issue beginning on page 76.  (Also, for those who came in late, my review of Wellspring Music's Process Pack software is in the June 2011 issue, on page 144, on the same website.) Enjoy! 

Brisbane Nocturne Revisited Revisited

Back in 2000, I wrote an electronic piece for that year's Australasian Computer Music Conference called Brisbane Nocturne. I also wrote a paper in which I described the processes and the patch for the piece in great detail. Recently, a number of us have been talking about the issue of the preservation of live electronic music pieces. So for this year's ACMC, I decided to see if I could reassemble Brisbane Nocturne from my description of it. The piece was written using John Dunn's SoftStep, the predecessor to ArtWonk, controlling Martin Fay's Vaz Modular virtual analogue synthesizer. I resurrected SoftStep from the software vault – it still works just fine – and following the paper line by line, reassembled the original SoftStep patch based on the description in the paper. I should mention that after deciding to do this project, I did not listen to the original piece. One of the aims of the project was to reassemble the piece without reference to the original, and only after the performance, see how close I came.

I was successful in reassembling the patch, and performed it at ACMC 2012, in Brisbane, in a pretty successful performance. A few days after getting back from the conference, I made a studio recording of it, and then I listened to the new version and the original. My reconstruction was largely successful. What was different in the two versions was that the original was a lot more controlled and balanced than the new version. Dynamics vary more widely in the new version, and my average tempo is slower than the original, but varies more from moment to moment. So, for those that have an interest in such things, here is the original performance:

 Brisbane Nocturne (2000) for live computer performance

 and here is the new version:

 Brisbane Nocturne Revisited (2012) for live computer performance

 And for those interested in the details, click here for the original paper.

I don't know if I actually proved that it's possible to resurrect live electronic pieces based on a verbal description. It worked in this case, but the fact that the software still worked on current computers (I've been using XP since it first came out – that's more than a decade, right?) helped things a lot. The unavailability of the original patch, due to the fact that I archived all my backups around 2000-2002 with a program I no longer have (!) is one thing that makes me think that verbal descriptions are very important. I remember back in 1970, at Darmstadt, Karlheinz Stockhausen described notating one of his early electronic pieces in great detail, then said it was, in the end, futile because the filters he used to make the piece no longer existed, and the copies of the filter still in existence had capacitors which had corroded and changed their sound. So I still don't know what the “ideal life-span” of a live electronic piece is. But at least in this case, I was able to make a recording which sounds fairly close to the original. Perhaps recordings really are the way this music is going to survive.

Nightshade Etudes Book 1 - a new mini-album

Friends and visitors to this website are invited to download a new piece - a six-track mini-album - Nightshade Etudes Book One. Just click here to download the zip file with the six mp3 files, pdf notes and album cover. (The file is only 24mb in size.)  This is a set of six pieces which were made by using protein patterns from six members of the nightshade family as musical data to make small etudes.  There are some interesting experiments with microtonal harmony and counterpoint in the pieces.  The pieces were made on my netbook using John Dunn's ArtWonk and the Modartt Pianoteq physical modelling synthesizer.  So if you're interested in hearing me play a harpsichord with a potato, now's your chance.

100xJohn 16: The View from Wombat Hill - a new piece at EMF

As part of their 100th birthday celebrations for John Cage, Electronic Music Foundation is organizing 100xJohn, a series of pieces using environmental sounds in celebration of John Cage's life and work.  I recently made my contribution for the series, and it's currently available for listening on the Ear To The Earth website.  You can access the page for all the pieces here.  So far, there are 16 pieces on the site - mine is number 16.  So far, I've heard numbers 1-4, and 10 & 11, and they're all pretty neat, and worth hearing.  If you want to access my piece directly, click here.

The source sounds for my piece were recorded in the Wombat Hill Botanical Gardens in Daylesford.  Here are a couple of photos of the Gardens.

Here are the program notes for my piece:

Made for EMF’s 100xJohn project, this piece combines environmental sounds with algorithmically controlled electronic processing.  100 recordings – 10 second sound snapshots, if you will – were made in the Wombat Hill Botanical Gardens in Daylesford, Victoria, Australia, on the mornings of Monday April 2 (the first 50, on the south side of the hill), and Friday April 6 (the last 50, on the north side of the hill).  Wombat Hill is an extinct (we hope) volcano and the village of Daylesford is built upon its slopes.  The Botanical Gardens were designed in the late 19^th century by Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, and feature deciduous trees from all over the world, including some huge California Redwoods, which have taken to the rich soil and cool moist climate of Daylesford in style, today towering over the surrounding landscape.

For each environmental recording, the direction and location of each recording was determined by the location of a tree in the gardens.  That is, for each recording, the recorder is set facing a different tree.  During the first recording session, in fact, a slight wind sprang up, and the recorder was actually rested against the trees, which acted as rather large windscreens.  So one might say that Baron von Mueller determined the position of the recordings, if not the time of their making.

Tree as windscreen

Recording an auracaria.

Each 10 second recording was processed in two ways.  First, it was put through Richard Orton and Archer Endrich’s “Process Pack” software, using the “Shimmer” process.  Shimmer is a process which divides an incoming sound into 100 frequency bands, and then arranges those bands in a number of different ways, reconstructing a sound by frequency content.  There are a number of parameters which determine the spacing of the frequency bands and how they are then rearranged in time.  The values for these parameters were determined by John Cage and Andrew Culver’s “ic” program. For each sound sample, I plugged the relevant ic determined values into Shimmer, and recorded the output.

The second form of processing was done with the demo version of GRM Tools “Evolution.”  Evolution grabs spectra from an incoming sound, and morphs between successive grabs.  Just as with Shimmer, parameter values for Evolution were made by running ic, and these values were used for each successive recording.

This work (and like some of John Cage’s processes, this involved a LOT of busy work), done on 11 and 12 April, resulted in 300 sound files: 100 originals, 100 Shimmer processed, and 100 Evolution processed.  The original environmental recordings were simply butt-spliced end to end making a 16:40 sequence.  The butt-splicing sometimes results in abrupt transitions from one “scene” to another.  The two processings are mixed with the original environmental recordings, each one beginning in sync with the recording it is derived from.  These were all mixed together, resulting in a multilayered, constantly changing sound-scape, in which the kind of electronic sounds derived from the environmental recordings is continually different – the differences determined by the ic values for the parameters.

Vexations Re-tuned - my contribution

As part of this year's Micro-Fest in Los Angeles, John Scheider invited a number of microtonal composers, yours truly included, to make an alternate tuning to Erik Satie's Vexations.  Vexations, for those of you who have forgotten, is supposed to be repeated 840 times, and uses a bewildering variety of double sharps, double flats, etc in its notation.  If you take the accidentals seriously, there are 21 pitches that Satie uses.  So the obvious question would be (obvious to microtonalists, that is), what would Vexations sound like with 21 different pitches in the octave.  17 of us responded, and here's the program, which happened on April 1, at the Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Center, on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.

It's a very nice crew that contributed, and some of them have already written their scales, and the reasons behind them.  Here's Kraig Grady's explanation of his scale, and the performance, here's Terumi Narushima's explanation of her scale, and the performance, and here is Kyle Gann's explanation of his.  I'd love to be able to give you an erudite explanation of my scale, but the truth is, I've lost the notes, and I can't remember a thing about how I made it.  None the less, here's my tuning for Satie's Vexations:

 0:  C         1/1                0.000  unison, perfect prime

  1:  C#       17/16            104.955  17th harmonic

  2:   Db      128/119        126.219

  3:   D        32/29            170.423  29th subharmonic

  4:   Ebb    8/7                 231.174  septimal whole tone

  5:   D#      39/32            342.483  39th harmonic, Zalzal wosta of Ibn Sina

  6:   Eb      79/64             364.537

  7:   E        5/4                 386.314  major third

  8:   F        4/3                 498.045  perfect fourth

  9:   F#      11/8               551.318  undecimal semi-augmented fourth

 10:  Gb     16/11             648.682  undecimal semi-diminished fifth

 11:   G      3/2                 701.955  perfect fifth

 12:   G#    51/32             806.910

 13:   Ab    8/5                 813.686  minor sixth

 14:   A      209/128         848.831

 15:   Bbb  64/39             857.517  39th subharmonic

 16:    A#   7/4                 968.826  harmonic seventh

 17:    Bb   29/16             1029.577  29th harmonic

 18:    B     119/64           1073.781

 19:    Cb   32/17             1095.045  17th subharmonic

 20:    B#   243/128         1109.775  Pythagorean major seventh

 21:    C     2/1                 1200.000  octave

Anybody who wants to get a PhD in Music Theory is welcome to try and analyse this - the only note I have regarding its genesis is "based on Erv Wilson's Mt Meru scales work," which is not too helpful, but at least points one in the right direction.

There are sound recordings of five other tunings up on the Micro-Fest website - tunings by Bill Alves, Kyle Gann, Ron Nagorcka, John Schneider, and Terumi Narushima.  Listen to them here.

Finally, here's the recording of my piece. Thanks to John and the pianist Richard Valitutto, for permision to post this, and thanks to Richard for his wonderful performance.  By the way, John and Richard recently also made the new, magnificent recording of Harry Partch's Bitter Music on Bridge Records.

John Schneider tells me that there will be a CD release soon of all the tunings from the Vexations project, so I'll let you know about that as soon as I do.  

http://www.warrenburt.com/storage/SatieBurtValitutto.mp3

Erik Satie: Vexations - retuned by Warren Burt - performed by Richard Valitutto.

Enjoy!