Entries from November 1, 2020 - November 7, 2020

Sunday
Nov012020

Just Another Just Chorale - the latest in the series

This latest tune continues the explorations of chaotic system generation modules in VCV Rack and miRack.  Here, however, I'm making a thicker texture, one that is more chorale like, and one that has a more continuously shaped sense of phrasing.  The central core of this piece is Antonio Tuzzi's "Boh!ngler" module, a kind of sample and hold feeding a shift register feedback circuit.  It can produce 16 simultaneous (and related) random control sequences. Quite useful. Michael Hetrick's Random Gates distributes the first 8 voltages to 8 separate oscillators, which are then processed through 8 Lindenberg West Coast wave shapers.  Processing of the Boh!ngler outputs was done with a set of Holonic Systems Swiss Cheese Knife modules.  This piece was made on the iPad, and I thought it would be fun to try out the Apple Pencil as a means of control.  This worked wonderfully well - the tiny knobs in miRack responded quite readily to the pencil, and gave me quite fine control, especially of the frequency of the main driving Low Frequency Oscillator.  The oscillators are playing in a 25-tone Just Intonation scale - made by adding up several 7 note Erv Wilson additive sequence scales (made in Wilsonic), then mixing them with the inversion of those same scales (following Harry Partch's notion that any good scale should be symmetrical), making the 25 note scale heard here.  It consists of mostly very consonant Just intervals with the occasional close and crunchy relationships.  When used over a several octave range, with pitches randomly selected by the 
Boh!ngler control sequences, the result seems to be a pleasing mix of consonance and dissonance.  This is, once again, a live performance, this time on the iPad Pro, improvising within the limits and parameters of the patch.