Browse Items (868 total)

• Music for 88 keys: to Conlon Nancarrow, in memoriam

  Music for 88 keys is the first example of a composition based on the sonification and remix of materials property data from the online computational materials repository AFLOWLIB, the heart of the materialssoundmusic project.The sonification algorithm behind Music for 88 keys maps the materials information into sound by encoding data into MIDI events in an automated high-throughput fashion. The sonic data are fed to audio generating patches written for MAX and Ableton Live through a DataPlayer app. The algorithm used in the creation of Music for 88 keys maps data to the MIDI notes 21 through 108 (the 88 keys of the piano) and associates an amplitude (MIDI velocity) to each note derived from a manipulation of the same dataset. The duration of any MIDI event (that is a representation of rhythm and meter) is inferred from the rate of variation of the data (i.e. their derivative in time), making each material soundscape completely internally consistent. The MIDI stream so generated is then treated as a collection of musical structures for further compositional elaboration. “Music for 88 keys” is a suite born from the remix of the data from Diamond, Zinc Oxide and Gold. The piece is scored for player piano and electronics and is dedicated to the memory of Conlon Nancarrow, the American composer who made the player piano his instrument of choice throughout his career. In Music for 88 keys the original datasets from AFLOWLIB.org are variably manipulated through different techniques: from simple variations of tempo and meter to extensive reordering of pitches or regions and various orchestration choices. The suite starts with a preludio that uses the sonic mapping of the data for Diamond as starting compositional material. The same concept is used in the interludio, but with data from a different material, Zinc Oxide. Interludio separates the two principal sections of the suite: largo and andante, with the piano accompanied by sampled percussions sounds and based again on data from Diamond, from continuo, based on the data for Zinc Oxide for piano with a drone of brass, and  contrappunto aureo, based on the data from Gold, where the brass and the percussions are both combined with the piano. The suite ends with a postludio, where the piano alone states again a sonic mapping of data that now combines the three materials.

• Bamboo's Ghost

  In Bengal, young children are told that the whispers and crackles they hear near bamboo bushes are the voices of the ghosts that live there. With this story in mind, I have created a piece where I have elaborated the natural sounds made by bamboo trees when they are moved by the wind. These natural sounds are then mixed with other ambient sounds (street, traffic, conversations) and processed so that the resulting composition is characterized by a remote and abstract atmosphere. The original sounds have been recorded in Jakkur, India, in the summer of 2006.

• Two drones: Kaleida and Threnos

  For the podcast “StaticMusic/Drones” of the New York Miniaturist Ensemble, 2007.

• Look to Third

  “Democracy is lovely, but baseball is more mature.” – Richard Greenberg

  In my never ending search for formal models which paradoxically display properties of randomness and asymmetry yet completeness and structure, I turned to baseball. The skeleton of this piece (although it wouldn’t be apparent unless I told you) is derived from a scorecard I kept of a Cubs/Cardinals game. The title references what one commentator refers to as “a move which has worked once in the last twenty years” – the Look to Third, throw to first. In homage to the many paradoxes that lie latent within the game of baseball (for example, it’s a pastoral game with urban roots) there is a second possible, more literal, reading of the title. This is music which is inspired by the features of sculpture, the art form which dwells in the third dimension and utilizes space, volume and perspective. Baseball is often described as poetry in motion, and any true fan of the game can speak to this point for hours as they describe the beauty and intricacies of watching an infield in motion as a ball is perfectly bunted down the line or the excitement of judging whether a throw from the outfield will beat out a runner at the plate. These motions through space become the narrative, the story of each game. Every baseball game has 9 innings, 27 outs per team, yet each game, each story is different and unique. It is these aspects of the game that this piece tries to capture, for each movement, with the aid of electronics, presents essentially the same structural narrative but in a unique way, from a unique physical perspective. Imaging how the same musical materials would react and resonate as they move through different physical spaces guided the creation of this piece, and is the way in which the piece “looks to third” for inspiration – I’m still working on the throw to first.

• smudge

  smudge attempts to take the tuba’s sound and blend, smear and shade it in the same way a visual artist would create a charcoal drawing. The two electronic effects used in the piece serve this goal. Reverb, which acts like the damper pedal of a piano, blurs the sound horizontally in time while ring modulation creates pitched sidebands around the tuba’s sound, blurring the sound vertically. The melodic material is also “smudged” in a similar way. The materials always heard with reverb are musically expanded in a vertical direction while the materials associated with ring modulation are horizontally developed – creating a paradoxical and elastic experience with an instrument that usually draws in a straight line.

• Puzzle Pieces

  Puzzle Pieces was commissioned by The Stockhausen Response Project for pianist Brianna Matzke

  As a composer of electroacoustic music, the figure of Stockhausen – the indelible German (or Sirius-ian?) explorer, technician, and mystic philosopher of 20th century music – looms large. In Mikrophonie I (the specific work that we were asked to respond to), Stockhausen breaks ground that the medium of electroacoustic music has in some ways been responding to ever since. From a technical standpoint, as one might surmise from the title, this work elevated the status of the microphone from a passive piece of hardware to an instrument capable of an extremely subtle range of expressive gestures. In fact to perform the work, one must become something of a virtuoso microphone performer in order to execute Stockhausen’s incredibly detailed notation for the instrument. This perceptive restructuring liberated the status of electronics in music by putting the ‘microphonist’ on the same plane as the violinist. From this perspective, all of my music, which seeks to integrate electronics in nuanced and novel ways in order to enhance the range of expressive possibilities, is made possible by Stockhausen’s contributions.

  Mikrophonie I is also a primary example of another of Stockhausen’s influential ideas: moment form. Simply put, Stockhausen’s conception of a moment form is one in which, “no developmental direction can be predicted with certainty from the present one.” Far from a license for piecemeal composition, Stockhausen was searching for a means to restructure the dimensions of music. By calling our attention to the ‘Now’, he seeks to, “make vertical slices, as it were, that cut through a horizontal temporal conception to a timelessness I call eternity: an eternity that does not begin at the end of time but is attainable in every moment. I am speaking of musical forms in which apparently nothing less is being attempted than to explode (even to overthrow) the temporal concept.” By seeking to expand upon the dimensional planes in which the structural logic of the piece is projected, Puzzle Pieces is my humble attempt to expand upon the implications of Stockhausen’s ‘Now’.

• sliced attractor

  Chaos has a theory. Despite the implications of the word itself, the study of chaos has revealed that there is a high degree of order (and predictable disorder) in the places where we have observed chaos. Research in this field has lead to insights into turbulence, the formation of snowflakes and galaxies, and the rhythm of our own heartbeats. In fact, one might say that natural order itself is ruled by chaos. It quite literally surrounds us.

  Simple systems can easily be described with simple equations. (Think of linear equations from high school). Therefore, it was always believed that complex systems, such as the one finds in nature, would require equally complex mathematics to describe. Remarkably, this is not true. Complex chaotic systems can be described with astonishingly simple equations. The complexity of nature is great, but it is perhaps even more wonderful to note that the logic which balances it all is in essence elementary.

  Simply put, sliced attractor is chaotic music in this sense. It is complex music that is achieved through simple means. A simple (but chaotic) pattern permeates the piece and is found at all levels of magnitude, yet it is used to generate a high degree of complexity. This music is orderly in its disorder, predictably unpredictable, and simply complex.

• Space-time Julienne

  As Einstein showed us, time and space are intimately linked. Space-time Julienne seeks to draw upon this concept by presenting a phenomenological experience that tugs at our understanding of this relativistic drama. In more musical terms, this is music that attempts to use space as a contrapuntal axis – a source of tension, development, and drama.

  An incredibly condensed history of painting would tell the story of perspective: how a two-dimensional surface can give the impression of the third. (Modern painters have abstracted and subsumed this concept in the best possible ways.) Over the past hundred years or so, the history of sculpture shows a similar yearning. From Calder’s mobiles, to Smithson’s earthworks, to the kinetic sculptors of the present, sculptors have broken down the three-dimensional constraints of their medium by adding the fourth dimension – the temporal. Can music, which has always existed in this four walled arena, achieve a similar goal?

  What these advancements offer to these other mediums is a reflexive perspective. The perspective that asks, “What is a urinal?” A perspective that allows the medium to abstract upon its potentials, so perhaps you can see it for what it really is. In this way, I want to write music that looks at music. Music that uses time to explore what it is inside of space. A ball of energy that extrudes itself from time.

• Contrails

  Aus Liebe Will Mein Heiland Sterben
  
  

  The idea of a “contrail,” a trail left behind after something’s passing, is interpreted in several ways in this piece. The electronics serve as a “contrail” to the flute, capturing and sustaining certain resonant frequencies of the flute’s sound. The whole work is also a contrail of Bach’s aria, “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” from St. Matthew’s Passion, about the compassion of Christ’s self-sacrifice. Most of the material in this piece was derived from a spectral analysis of the aria. The compositional process involved using an original computer algorithm running in ACToolbox to “morph” smoothly between spectrally generated material and the original flute melody found in the aria. This interpolation occurs in nearly every parameter of the music (rhythm, pitch, dynamics, etc.). The effect is that one musical idea gradually recedes from the texture revealing a second idea hidden within or beneath it. As this patina dissolves, notes or phrases from the original aria are sometimes heard to emerge from the resonant, fluttering abyss from which the work begins.

  A stereo version of Contrails exists as well.

• Bright Waves- percussion duet

  Bright Waves was inspired by the concept of a luminescent ocean wave. In some tropical oceans, bioluminescent plankton (drifting organisms) in the water column glow when the sea is disturbed. A wave containing these microorganisms can be seen simultaneously on the micro and on the macro level; each individual swirl and eddy within the wave approximating a fractal (self-similar reproduction) of the wave as a whole. In Bright Waves, I use a series of dynamic loops and randomized delays to move musical material seamlessly between foreground and background. The slow rate of change, simple macro structure, and micro polyphony are meant to evoke the gathering, cresting, and chaotic breaking of a single powerful ocean wave.