Rude Octaves

Just hit play while you're reading this. It's good mood music.

I created this patch that isn't very performance-friendly, and needs some debugging (the random number generator provides the same number to all 16 patches) but still got a solid 8 1/2 minutes of waves from it. At its peak, there are 16 oscillators going at once, all at different frequencies. It works like this:

16 instances of this patch, 8 on the left and 8 on the right channel, all with independent volume controls. Each patch has a cosine wave at its own frequency: 12 Hz, in the picture. Then, there's a random-number function that picks a number from 0-15 (default) every 25 (default) milliseconds. You can hear, at the beginning, it's only a new number every 1000 milliseconds (one second), but that must be changed manually. Then, that number is x in the function 2^x.

So, you have a number (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.) randomly generated to multiply your base frequency by. Your frequency (12, in this case) is then 12, 24, 48, 96, etc. Now--who knew?--those are all octaves. So, what you get is a randomly generated octave jump every 25 milliseconds, and instead of a particular melody you just get weird waves of harmony.

It begins with 1 Hz (frequencies are inaudible under about 20 Hz, so you get sort of this weird clicking instead for some of the parts), then you hear the 3 Hz (perfect fifth up) enter. Later, the 5 Hz (major third up) enters, and you've got this pretty triad. Eventually, the 7 Hz (lowered 7th), 9 Hz (perfect fifth of perfect fifth, a.k.a. roughly a major second), and 13 Hz (sort of a major sixth, but way cooler than your mother's major sixth) all enter.

I save the 11 Hz for towards the end--know why? Because it's amazing. It's probably one of the wildest notes of creation. I think of it as the bastard child of the harmonic series. At least we tried to accommodate roughly the major third (5/1), sixth (1/5), the perfect fifth (3/1), the dominant seventh (7/1)--but we didn't even bother with 11/1. It's almost exactly halfway between two equal-tempered (piano-scale) notes. And one of those notes we called "diablo en musica," the tritone. Needless to say, I love the eleventh harmonic.

I'm going to London tomorrow.

bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!

So I'm plunging headlong into sine waves, stacking them on top of each other and finding octaves and harmonics and exponential amplitudes with formulas like:

x^[10 * (y/20)], given that y is amplitude in decibels and x is amplitude in a decimal from 0-1.

I don't really understand it either, except that it is interesting how we hear volume on a logarithmic scale at log10, while we hear pitch at log2. Though pitches in the lower register can change pitch with a change of 10 Hz (55 Hz = A, 65 Hz = C, almost), pitches in the higher ranges take longer to shift (the same A-to-C interval would be 80 Hz at a higher range). It makes you (me) wonder if we see on this same scale: imagine a car hurtling towards you on a back road, a half-mile off. Now imagine a car hurtling towards you about 10 feet away. Aside from the clear terror you're feeling, the car seems to be going much faster when it's about to hit you.

(Aside: remember that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the knight, I forget which one, is charging the camera in a continuous loop, then all of a sudden he is there and stabs the poor man? Clearly, they share my theory.)

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I just got my visa extended for the summer, so I'm a legitimate entity again. I'm starting my first interview Monday, going to London on Tuesday, interviewing again Wednesday, coming back Thursday, and interviewing again Friday, and probably Saturday as well. It seems like I'd be busy, but between sending out a few e-mails a day and going to at least one concert a week I still manage to spend most of my time learning to make noises on the keyboard.

The main purpose of the noises is for the Autopsy section of the opera, using the text of Jorie Graham's poem "San Sepolcro." The entire section will be voice and drones of spectral-tuned waves, very ambient. No need for an orchestra, just a laptop (maybe more than one, a laptop orchestra) and about a thousand speakers.

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I didn't know where to put this, but I thought it was funny. Finnegan's Wake in Wiki-format, so that you can add your own references for every single word or phrase. I read about five or six pages of it last night (on actual paper, from the library) but then when I pulled up the site it just made it less fun. If you read it aloud and don't click on the links it makes much more sense, or at least it's pretty. There's something to be said for picking apart every note/word of a great work, but it certainly helps to play/read it through once or twice to hear it.

The sun never sets on Dublin

This time of year, in the days around the summer solstice, it's never quite night in Dublin. After the 9:58 sunset light still clings to the western horizon, and the dusk haze slowly circles around until the 4:58 dawn.

During the 10-day visit from my parents we criss-crossed over Ireland, visiting historic sites ranging from c. 3000 BC to 1916 and later, bicycled Inis Oírr a few times in two hours, ran out of gas in villages with stations closing at 10 p.m., and figured a skeleton for an epic opera.

Today, though, after they left, was one of the first sunny days in Dublin for a while. I made it up to Howth Head, 20 miles total, on my bicycle and hiked partway up and around the head, just enough to where I lost sight of the civilized world, and only until the wind started to pick up. About a three hour trip in all, but considering that I have no schedule and can only bother the same people for interviews so many times it wasn't too much trouble.

I would have gotten some great photos, but I don't really take pictures and also don't bring my camera with me anywhere. So you'll have to do with just first imagining nothing, then the sound of seagulls, then a green ocean with a canoe carrying four people in orange life vests, then exhaustion coupled with near vertigo from the sheer cliffs separating you from the water.

CRASH (again)

Just can't help it: even though I've written about the Crash Ensemble a few hundred times already, I saw them again the other night and it was at least as good. A greatest hits concert, I suppose, with all commissions written specifically for the ensemble--three for roughly the full ensemble (no vocals, though), one string quartet, and one string quintet with two pianos. The second one, "Forced March," was by David Lang, one of the founding members of the Bang on a Can ensemble and the Pulitzer Prize winner for composition in 2008. I shook his hand.

Anyway, the other items on the docket were Terry Riley's Loops for Ancient Giant Nude Hairy Warriors Racing Down the Slopes of Battle, Gerald Barry's First Sorrow ("If someone could figure out how to make a poignancy grid, to attain the greatest level of poignancy..."), Kevin Volans's Connecting the Dots, and Donnacha Dennehy's Gra agus Bas ("Well, folks, looks like poignancy is the name of the game tonight.") I had only heard First Sorrow, the string quartet, before, but I had heard recordings of many of the others from their premieres last year. The string quartet is still my favorite, although Loops for Ancient Giant Nude... is probably the most fun, with a full-distortion electric guitar solo.

In other news: Beckett's "Not I" as a contemporary of bebop jazz, and as a precursor of slam poetry. Discuss.

That's a 151 MB .avi version, but you can find it at YouTube as well. It's free and public domain (I guess? The www.ubu.com site is legal, I think) so I'd recommend just downloading it and watching it when you have 10 minutes of time to block out. It's too good to chop up into bits, and, although it gets exhausting, you must go on.

Is this preferable to silence? (We are winning the war on terror)

For anyone familiar with This American Life (all of you), you might remember the segment that they excerpted from the WNYC show Radio Lab about a year ago. Radio Lab doesn't have new episodes quite as much as This American Life does, but it's consistently incredible. But that's not the point.

The point is, Jad Abumrad, the host of Radio Lab, has come out with a 4-part series on WNYC called "Wordless Music," after the Wordless Music festival which features indie rock performers on the same ticket as classical musicians: Beruit will play in the same night as someone performing Osvaldo Golijov, or Jonny Greenwood (guitarist from Radiohead) will just play. Check out Episode Two of this especially--I'm not crazy about the middle piece, but all of you need to hear Arvo Pärt's (pear-t) "Fratres," especially you, Mom. The Crash Ensemble did a whole half concert (part of a Dublin-wide festival) on Pärt, an Estonian-born expatriated composer with strong mystic Eastern (Russian Orthodox) influences.

In other news, I found a sample of George Bush saying, "We are winning the war on terror," and I mapped it to my keyboard, with multiple filters and distortion effects controlled by knobs, looped in layers. Also, if you hold the button down it loops "on terror." It's more of an improvised setup than a real composition, and really the kind of thing that needs to be heard live over giant speakers. So reserve the date of August 16, my backyard, private concert by Andrew Smith feat. George Bush.

The Harmonic of the Fundamental

If you take a particular signal (13 Hz, for example) and you multiply it by 2, you get an octave. If you multiply that by 3, you get a perfect fifth. If you multiply that by 5, you get a major third. If you multiply that by 72, you get the six octaves and a perfect fifth up from your original 13 Hz. If you plot a bunch of these on graph paper in colored pencils (to designate different wave forms), you get my day. Each horizontal square is one second; each vertical square is one harmonic (the first square is 13 Hz, second is 26 Hz, third is 39 Hz, etc.) Blue is a sine wave (obviously), orange is sawtooth, red is triangle, green is parabola, yellow is pulse, and brown is noise with an added sine wave for color. Brown only comes in the 64th harmonic, by the way.

And if you keep wondering to yourself, Why do I keep reading this blog, when it's usually unintelligible rambling about waves and ultimately irritating noises?, then I'll tell you why: Cousin photos.



It's only a minute long; it's not like you haven't listened to more irritating things for 60 seconds.



http://www.willamette.edu/~acsmith/struktur.mp3

Gas Tax Holiday

I figured, call them in the afternoon my time, because how many people are making credit card fraud claims at four in the morning? Apparently enough to keep me on hold for a while. Not that I have anything else to do, while Mozart or something equally vile is playing in the background, and I am adding my own special layer on it with my multi-oscillator software synthesizer and two-octave keyboard. It's something in E major, and it's been going on for ages. I think it's a rondo, either that or it's just on a continuous loop.

7:56

Someone has been using my debit card to buy gas in Beaumont, which I thought meant the Beaumont Shell Station just up the street (near Beaumont Hospital) but which apparently means Beaumont, California, seeing as how whoever it is drove to Pomona, and unless it's an amphibious craft (which would explain why they guy spends $450 on gas in a week) it doesn't look like he lives in Dublin.

12:52

Pretty sure this is Chopin, probably early Chopin, because it still has the minor-key arpeggiated bass with some rocking tuplets in the right hand.

15:28

Turns out it's my OTHER debit card, which I had never cancelled, so I get to keep this one. Good news, although now we're up to about $540 in charges. I'm starting to support Hilary's gas tax holiday.

22:00 or so

Well, getting that credited back to my account temporarily. Plus I get to sign an affidavit and mail it back to them, and keep my current debit card. So, back to programming synthesizers to make weird noises. I found a sweet vocoder effect, but more on that later.