"Horizontal Movements"

I composed these 2 pieces almost 2 years ago, but even though they are very autobiographical, I never really talked about the inspiration for them. So I've added a description on SoundCloud.

Like a lot of my music, these 2 pieces are autobiographical, at least in the sense that they were composed during and immediately in response to some significant events in my life - in this case my involvement in the Occupy Wall Street protests. They were composed in late December 2011 through early January 2012, while I was taking some time off from activism to recuperate after police chaos and setbacks of late November and December. The "Frozen Zone" of the titles refers to both the blockade that the NYPD set up in the Financial District in the middle of the night as they evicted protesters from Liberty Square, and more metaphorically to all systemic injustice.

Although the music doesn't convey any overt political messages, the act of writing it was kind of a meditation on the idea of leaderless organizing (the anarchist political philosophy of "Horizontalidad / Horizontalism"). I think of the sounds as being "horizontal" in the sense that there's no hierarchy working to organize them. The musical parts aren't divided into "instruments or "voices" - there's just a single algorithm generating clusters of sine waves. Those individual sine waves, which only differ in pitch and amplitude, converge temporarily to create harmonies, and then dissipate.

"Rugs Not Drugs"

Spent most of the day going in circles with some scope / environment stuff in Supercollider and haven't really had the time to make sense of the docs on how to do inheritance with a Proto.  The Apollo 11 sonification idea has come back to the foreground - was listening to some old drone pieces like Whiteout Drunk c omposed back when I didn't know how to do rhythm in Supercollider - that kind of 1-dimensional restriction was good for me, especially for the narrow emotional range I was willing to engage with in my music back then.

The drone server has been finicky - keeps crashing because, being hosted on a virtual server, the cpu allocation isn't constant and at some point the scsynth process sucks up 100% of the available cpu and jackd crashes.  I'd like to write a piece with is the sonification of its own system resource usage, but that would require having a separate sclang process to monitor peakCPU (probably - but again, figuring out how to do it in a SynthDef is the kind of restriction I like.  As far as I know thought, SynthDefs are constant in the # of cycles they use once instantiated).

I'd like to turn the Rugs not Drugs pieces in to something longer (originally I was imagining them as 90 minutes and 4hrs) but my interest in that world seems to wax and wane on a monthly cycle.  I had orignally come up with those heavily phase-modulated synths back in June, while working on drones that could fit into a Twitter post.

~synthFactory.("big-drone2",{|freq=120, n=#[1,2,3,4,5,6], p=#[0.5,0.66,1,2,3,4],x=3,of=4, ra=3,tt=1|

  	  var a=p *.x n,
    	f=a*freq,
    	b=SinOsc,
    	c=FSinOsc,
    	r=b.ar(1/f,c.ar(tt,of/a,of/a,0).tanh,c.ar(1/f.reverse,0,x,x)),
    	t = c.ar(tt,pi/2,1/2,1/2);
  	b.ar(PinkNoise.ar(f.log2,f) ,Blip.ar(PinkNoise.ar(r.sum**(f.log2 / 8192.log2),f),x,pi*b.ar(1/f,r,r)),((b.ar((r+r.sum).abs.sqrt/ra,r,2,2)**3)/f)*b.ar(a/(p**t) ,b.ar(a+(r.sum)**t,r,pi*b.ar(1/a,r.sum,b.ar(1/a,r,a))),r/x,0))},{[-1,1]/(1..6)},x);

The drone created by this synth is a matrix of static pitches-amplitudes and phase modulation amounts change, via the r modulator, which is really the heart of the piece.  In 20110904 this synth is just instantiated w/ different starting values and left to run from anywhere from 5 seconds to 6 minutes.


20110904 by Backtrace I was inspired by the swaying motif's in Feldman's late orchestra stuff like "Coptic Light" - and by the way that the phrases in his music just hang in the air, each as its own little blob of sound, without really doing anything or going anywhere.  This was what I was hearing in my head as I spent an hour cleaning cat hair out of my hallway runner with a lint brush.



The entire code for 20110905 is here:

(
  ~allServers = [Server.local,Server.internal];
  ~allServers.collect({|serv|

    ~synthFactory.("ikat_yellow",{|a=#[1,1,1,1],t=#[128,129],xMod=1,xAdd=1,xRate=1,base=2,aExp=1|
      var x,p,h,
      e=1.exp,
      b=SinOsc;
      a=a*.x a*2;
      x=(b.ar((a**aExp) * xRate,0,xAdd,xMod)**e).tan;
      h =a *.x t;
      p =BrownNoise.ar(x.abs.log / base.log,t *.x a);
      b.ar(p,b.ar(p,0,((pi**(e/x)).sin)**x)*pi,6/h);
    },{[-1,1]/(1..4)},serv);

    ~synthFactory.("ikat_yellow_lower",{|a=#[1,1,1,1],t=#[128,129],xMod=1,xAdd=1,xRate=1,base=2,aExp=1|
      var x,p,h,
      e=1.exp,
      b=SinOsc;
      a=a*.x a*2;
      x=(b.ar((a**aExp) * xRate,0,xAdd,xMod)**e).tan;
      h =a *.x t;
      p =BrownNoise.ar(x.abs.log / base.log,h);
      b.ar(p,b.ar(p,0,((pi**(e/x)).sin)**x)*pi,6/h);
    },{[-1,1]/(1..4)},serv);
   

)

(
 Routine {

   ~f.set(\gate,0);
   ~g.set(\gate,0);

  ~f=Synth("ikat_yellow");
  ~f.setn(\a,[1,3/8,441/512,8/7]);
  ~f.setn(\t,[128,1.5**12]);
  ~f.set(\xRate,1/(3**8));
  ~f.set(\aExp,0);
  ~f.set(\xAdd,1.exp);
  ~f.set(\xMod,1.exp);
  ~f.set(\base,9);
  ~f.set(\amp,1);
  ~f.set(\gate,1);

  ~g=Synth("ikat_yellow_lower");
  ~g.setn(\a,[21/16,4/3,3/7,1]);
  ~g.setn(\t,[128 * (441/512) * (8/7),128]);
  ~g.set(\xRate,1/(3**8));
  ~g.set(\aExp,2);
 
  ~g.set(\xAdd,1);
  ~g.set(\xMod,14/49);
  ~g.set(\base,9);
  ~g.set(\amp,1.25);
  ~g.set(\gate,1);


  Routine {
    5.do({|x|
      var z = [8,7,9,7,8].wrapAt(x),
      w = [6,4,5,4,6].wrapAt(x);
      x.postln;
      [~f,~g].collect({|d|d.set(\xRate,(1/3**z))});
      (3**w).wait;
    })
  }.play;

  ((3**[6,4,5,4,6]).sum).wait;
  ~f.set(\gate,0);
  ~g.set(\gate,0);

}.play;
)

This piece instantiates 2 drones and just lets them run, tweaking one modulator parameter to divide the piece into blocks of [ 729, 81, 243, 81, 729 ] seconds.  The x modulator is the key here - the grumbling, ripping, and pinging sounds created as it modulates the amount of noise in each pitch layer of the drone.    The septimal scale is always mostly yellow to me (like the rug which inspired the piece).  I'm also really starting to like the 1:8/7 harmony - the inspiration for both of these pieces was just a drone on a stack of pitches at 8/7 ratios to each other.

20110905 by Backtrace