1-3-7-21-49-147

Just hit play.



Yes, friends, that is my new favorite guitar tuning. It is (if you're into this) an E (maybe), a third harmonic above that, a seventh harmonic of the E, a seventh harmonic of the third harmonic, a seventh harmonic of the seventh harmonic, a third harmonic of the seventh harmonic of the seventh harmonic (bringing us to 3x7x7 = 147).

In short, it's the greatest tuning ever created. I tried to pluck a tune normal guitar style, but it just wasn't doing the tuning justice, so I cradled the guitar between my legs like a cello, put my recorder in front of myself, picked up my violin bow, and started making noise. What you hear (as we speak, if you followed instructions) is an excerpt, after I got used to the mechanics of it, but before I started to run out of ideas. You'll notice it's mostly 5 minutes of drones; they aren't all drones, but when you vibrate the higher strings at 21 and 49 and 147 times the speed of the lower strings, their vibrations are so perfectly in tune with the natural vibrations of the lower strings that the whole thing starts to reverberate. All this really needs is to be even louder, and sustained for upwards of an hour.

Anyway, the last one (taeper, or repeat backwards) was also on guitar, but with a different tuning (1-4/3-7/4-9/4-11/4-4/1), and just the same thirteen (yes, prime numbers) notes, looped and played backward. There's a bandpass on the whole thing, so nothing changes except for the reinforced frequencies--the shift in melody that you hear is actually just a shift in filtration, like holding differently colored gels in front of a white light.

Dodging cars, succeeding (so far)

Trying to make the most of this page before next week, when I have to retire it (or at least change the name) and realizing that I haven't said anything with real words for weeks. I've got this plan for next week, the day after my birthday, where I'll move out August 1 (really just take most of my stuff to a friend's house so as to not pay rent) and bicycle to Derry. If I stop halfway, in Armagh, it will split the trip into two days, about 82 miles Friday and 70 miles Saturday.

The problem I ran into, though, on my test run today was getting out of Dublin. It's nearly impossible to make it out of here without hitting those 100 km/h and over roads. It's not so bad staying on back roads, even though there's really no shoulder and my knuckles are permanently pale, but at least the cars are shooting by at 50-60 km/h instead of 100 (reference: like riding on the Richland bypass highway, which is also scary, but at least then I know where I'm going). I'm thinking that if I can make it far enough out of Dublin and not get lost one of these days, then I can do it again next Friday. So, tomorrow it looks like it'll be a 60 mile round trip to Drogheda, which is almost the entire way to Armagh, up in the (capital-N?) north.

The only downside is that (did I say this already?) most of the directions from the last two-hour test ride are lost, my only memories of those last two hours being trying not to die. Anyway, I'll be home (alive, we hope) on August 7, but then off to Salem/Portland probably for a day or two, so we'll figure something out.

taeper

Budapest: In three parts

Budapest
In Three Parts
Copyright July 15, 2008

"It just gets destroyed, then rebuilt, destroyed, then rebuilt."
-Claire McQuerry

Pt. I: The Ottomans

All begin on pattern A, beginning at different times, in canon. Move to pattern B at will, again in canon, but with the tempos shifted so that each repeat takes the same duration. There is a simple formula for this, tX being the tempo of either pattern: tA/7 = tB/5. Play until all reach B and fade out individually.





Pt. II: The Hapsburgs

Split into two groups: one group plays notes from A, while the other plays notes from B. Repeat until it crumbles.




Pt. III: The Soviets

Pick any note from A. Change after 7 seconds. Repeat 7 times.
Pick any note from B. Change after 5 seconds. Repeat 5 times.

Encroach

You know when you can hear the rain approaching? I mean, when it's really not raining very hard but the trees a few houses down are really just eating it up, making all kinds of noise, clearly the only ones in this town who want more rain, and it crescendos coming closer and closer until it's really a torrent next door and the light sprinkle in your garden probably won't be very light for very long. That's a good time to decide to stay in for the day.

Leaving for Munich (then Salzburt, Halstatt, Vienna, Budapest) tomorrow. Should be fun.

lbs.

I'm somewhere between Kings Cross and York, and I just finished my vegetable pasty, and as Garrett Sholdice said, it doesn't take long out of London before that buzzing in your head quiets down. I haven't yet gotten used to the currency--so much prettier than the ecumenical euro--and probably won't get a chance to before I fly back to Dublin tomorrow.

Yesterday was boiling in London, easily 80 degrees. I could not think, stumbling around partly lost and partly just bored for the sake of nothing to do all day, and too much heat to do it in. It was vindicated, though, by the excellent concert by the Fidelio Trio, with old works by Donnacha Dennehy, Linda Buckley, and Kevin Volans, and new works by Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, and (sort of) Gerald Barry.

The reason I am even here in the first place was today's interview with Garrett and Ben, and London was the only place I could meet them both together. They've started this organization, Ergodos, putting on contemporary music concerts and commissioning new material as often as possible.

One thing (more than one, really) Ben said interested me, in terms of his critique of the European mindset: Ireland is now officially two weeks into a recession, and they are a brand-new organization applying for arts funding. In order to survive through public budget cuts, they realize, you have to put effort into opening revenue streams aside from the arts council. Their goal is more than just having the same fifteen people in the new music crowd show up for every gig; it's to actually get new audiences in the door. The concert that they held in conjunction with a school in New York and the Royal Irish Academy of Music exemplified this: the new music crowd was largely absent, but there were whole families there listening to this music written decades ago that is still off-the-charts abstract even now.

(When is music not abstract?)

I must resolve to take the train more often. Train stations are significantly more quaint that airports, the nature is pretty, and this train even has spotty WiFi. Luckily, on my trip next week (next week!) From Munich to Salzburg to Halstatt to Wien to Budapest I'll be taking trains the whole way. It's time to decompress, to sit in four-seat rows where airplane cabins would almost certainly have six seats. Plus they have outlets to plug in your computer.

And, finally, the best thing about England? Cask ale.

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.