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.