I wanted to take the chance to do something unplanned (picking up instruments and starting), about immediacy not polish, something personal, something both intimate and exuberant, and something grounding and physical. Since my workflow often involves a lot of computer based sound synthesis, it was nice to sit and play with my hands and breath.
Harmonic Motes
What happens when the individual pure harmonics making up a note have minds of their own? This is one result of playing with that question. It’s constructed out of just little clips of the pure sine waves for the first 8 harmonics of 220 Hz. I like it best listening on headphones not too loud (a bit more on that below), closing my eyes, and spacing out.
One interesting realization as I worked on this - using only pure sine waves means the volume of each pitch changes a lot depending on the sound system you listen on. This made deciding on a mix balance really tricky. It also means that playing the track loudly can resonate the speakers and their housing in not so pleasant ways (I’m looking at you, built-in Macbook speakers…). One benefit of headphones is you can keep the volume relatively low to avoid this. Also you get the bonus of better feeling of space and movement - close your eyes and it turns into a sort of immersive trance.
To make this, I created a Max patch to generate the sine tones and create the fade in and out shapes of varied lengths. I used Logic as a midi sequencer to program the patterns for Max.
Orchestra Hits and the Value of Play
I recently made a quirky little music web-app. You can check it out at orchestrahit.com (special thanks to Ed Platt for hosting the site!) and also read a bit about the process and some thoughts it has brought up for me below.
While working on this I found myself asking: what is this for? what am I gaining out of this time I’m spending creating this? Some of the answers I came up with included:
1 - A chance to practice some html, css, and javascript coding - something I find interesting but don’t always find much need for.
2 - A chance to explore the WebAudio API a bit (that’s what this code uses to actually load and trigger the samples). As a tool that let’s you make richer audio applications that run in web browsers, who knows - this could be useful some day for making something “real.” (I also discovered that the WebAudio API doesn’t work so great on Android browsers, which is a shame.)
3 - It’s kind of funny, so I guess that’s something.
And I realized that in all that, I was kind of dismissing, out-of-hand, the creation itself. The end product is actually fun to play with, even if there isn’t a specific goal in mind (I know I’ve had fun messing around with it). Which reminded me of the value of play as it’s own activity - no need for a reason or an end-game. And if play is important, then creating toys is valuable and worthy in and of itself. So, let me try this again:
Hey! I made this music toy - orchestrahit.com. I think it’s pretty fun and it makes me smile. Hope you enjoy it, too!
Bamboo Whistle Invocation
I’m always seeing new instruments and thinking: “How cool! I’ve got to have one of those!” Of course, the more instruments I collect, the trickier it feels to find the time to learn and play them!
Earlier this year, I bought this beautiful bamboo low D whistle made by Nevsky Sun of Abedabun Flutes. Over the last few weeks, I wanted to make sure to find the time to start learning and exploring this super-cool instrument, so I made myself some motivation: to write and record something on it.
So here it is - written and performed by me:
I’m continuing to explore the instrument and discover all it can do. I love all the subtlety of voicing and pitch control that is possible and how humanly expressive it sounds.
Because the room I was recording in wasn’t the quietest, I went with a pretty close micing, which means you’ll get a nice close-up sonic perspective of all the breathy, tactile details.
And if anyone’s ever interested in getting a wooden flute or whistle, check out Nevsky’s store on Etsy here. In addition to fippled whistles like this one, he makes various styles of flutes as well!