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.