jwilzewske: synthesizer

Showing posts with label synthesizer. Show all posts

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Terry Riley’s Aleph (א): Music to Code By

A leph in Jewish mysticism represents the oneness of the Divine. The letter can been seen as being composed of an upper yud, a lower yud, and a vav leaning on a diagonal. The upper yud represents the hidden and ineffible aspects of God while the lower yud represents God’s revelation and presence in the world. The vav connects the two realms.”
— Wikipedia.

T he 1-hour 53-min recording of Terry Riley’s solo synth performance of his composition, ‘א’, is beautiful—and precisely the sort of experience you would expect from Riley.

B ut, apart from whatever else it may be and apart from its merits as a composition and as a performance, I have found it to be especially conducive to my own productivity when working on complex math problems and coding software to solve them. For me, silence works only up to a point, after which I need minimalist music.

B ut not just any minimalist music. For example, Michael Nyman’s music interferes with concentration. La Monte Young’s music contains, for me, too many distractions. I do find Ellen Fullman’s recent work conducive, though, in the same way that Terry Riley’s ‘Aleph’ is conducive.

T he timbre of the Korg Triton Studio 88 Synth is bright like a Chinese single-reed or double-reed, but with a lot of spectral flux like a car horn... or a choir of Chinese tenor and bass suonas. Spectral flux and spectral irregularity are distinguishing features in car horns (see Lemaitre 2003, link below).

T he two-hour performance is filled with dense, organic, continually-changing textures—nimble car horns, if car horns can ever be nimble, and these are supernaturally nimble. The automaticity of preschool kids’ trying out their fingers on a keyboard, enjoying the raw pleasure of making notes and reproducing patterns and sequences... reflexive movements of their fingers and arms, yielding arpeggiation that involves just those notes that are within easy reach without stretching.

T he effect, some minutes into listening to it, evokes a freedom from intention and planning that is unknown to sober adults, and this is what facilitates my problem-solving and coding mind. The uncertain continuation of woodwind-like fingering patterns without aim, as long as they last, until superceded by some new motif... the stochastic, aleatoric innovations... Riley discounts the creative value of mind and deliberation and discounts it again, and again... the dollar-store of intellect... until the passion of meat is all that’s left, and animal instinct is restored...

O nly connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...”
— E.M. Forster, ‘Howard’s End’, Ch. 22, 1910.

H ere’s a short MP3 clip.

T here is a ceremonial, magisterial, quasi-liturgical quality of ‘Aleph’ that reminds me of requiem forms. Or of chant, which can be heard as both archaic and contemporary. It is a mystical piece that unfolds at an implacable, glacial pace. The tone is largely meditative and serene, which provides space for contemplation and veneration. There are dozens-of-voices atmospheric Ligeti-like sound-fogs... fields of dissonance that convey an inhuman, infinite, primeval power—this surely is part of the Hebrew significance of Aleph; as is true also of the meaning of ‘א’ in mathematics—fitting as well in the context of requiem-writing.

I t has been said that my ‘Requiem’ does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its over-inclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist’s nature? As to my ‘Requiem’, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper...”
— Gabriel Fauré, 1902.

T hroughout, the piece is prodigiously inventive, with prolific layers upon layers of rhythmic and harmonic complexity, yet all presented with what appears on the surface to be minimalistic... it embodies the best of what minimalism can be: full of latent variety that captures and nourishes the listener’s awareness. (Which is why I find it helpful to listen to when I am tackling a hard problem, and why I am writing this blogpost you are reading. If you are interested in reading more about quantitative evidence concerning music listening and work productivity, have a look at the links below, esp. the book by Vikram Kiran.)

T he seamless, cluster-like blends fan out like a spilled liquid on a flat surface—part of the organic quality of just intonation, providing a support structure for the synth suona-like parts, a Toop-style “rawness” of intonation that sustains the emotional intensity of the piece.

M ost a cappella ensembles naturally gravitate to just intonation because its ‘stability’ or ‘target-pitch predictability’ is comfortable. In that regard, maybe the spectral flux and on-again-off-again frisson of this Terry Riley recording will be of special interest to people of a vocal bent, both amateur and professional singers alike.

T his sound of synth suonas keening, synth voices keening, choir of synth car horns keening... bears some resemblance to the György Ligeti piece in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’, ‘Lux aeterna’... A friend who was overhearing my repeated playing of the 2 Riley ‘Aleph’ CDs wondered aloud “How can you stand that!? It’s driving me nuts!” So, to be truthful I should say that this is an acquired taste, or reveals a patience borne of equanimity. It is like being transported by William Kraft’s music in the walkway between terminals underneath Chicago’s O’Hare airport. It is like listening to a choir of chainsaws in the forest at a great and comfortable distance. Or like the persistent-but-beautiful bleating and tintinnabulation of sheep in a high alpine meadow in the Swiss alps, below the Jung Frau Joch in the late mornings of mid-summer. In other words, the bleating and tintinnabulation signify tolerant, salutary, and humane qualities that are implicit in our planet’s troubled story. Children of the Universe, you (every living creature) are here, hurray. Have a good life.

I n short, these are qualities which make humans, the sum of which could be seen in love (esp. agape, which in turn can be seen as an embodiment of the ‘idea of One’). The musical gaze cast from this sphere upon the story world is distanced, more or less withdrawn, non-judgemental, calm, quiet, and slightly melancholic, yet non-sentimental. As film music, tintinnabuli music often qualifies as an ‘against all odds’ score capable of making the complicated plot-level matters more poignant.”
— Kaire Maimets-Volt, p. 172.

I f you were in a foreign country and experiencing the local people performing on their native instruments, a long raga, for example—you would exhibit a tolerance toward such bleatings and tintinnabulations. But if instead, like my friend, you regard it as a choir of annoying car horns—multiple car alarms being set off repeatedly by marauding kids on a street a couple of blocks away—you just want it to stop.

I n summary, playing these 2 CDs consecutively without a break induces an awareness that can facilitate productive concentration at work and lift you into a realm beyond human understanding or hearing. The music requires an audience who must be willing to accept the spirit of the work and suspend their disbelief in order to receive its many rewards.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

AntiPatterns: Classical Banjo, Code Refactoring, and Short Time-scale Acoustical Physics

O ne has merely to hear the banjo’s strings touched, or one double-stop drawn out on the fiddle, to recognize the sense in which the meaning of bluegrass begins simply with what these instruments essentially are: it is the aim of bluegrass style to set forth what the instrument—or for that matter the person playing the instrument—essentially is.”
— Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown, p. 203.

A thousand kilometers away, one of my nephews is tackling learning banjo. I give him Bullard’s book (link below) and begin listening to exotic recordings by Bela Fleck and John Bullard and others, in hopes of having mutually fun dialogues with my nephew, via email and face-to-face when I go and visit him.

T he banjo sounds on these recordings remind me of the sound—the ‘interiority’, the ‘earnestness’—of traditional shamisen or samisen (三味線, literally “three-taste strings”) music. Shamisen is similar to banjo in that the dō, the skin-covered box, is a lightly-damped resonator, much like the banjo’s. Both instruments are highly percussive and relatively ‘bright’. Both are plucked with the fingers or with a plectrum.

S o I go looking around to see what spectral analysis studies have been published about banjo or shamisen. I am curious to better understand the reasons that explain the unusual tone or timbre of each. Välimäki and coworkers spent a lot of effort on the matter in the mid-1990s (link below). Unlike guitar and other stringed instruments, for banjo the 5th harmonic (fourth overtone; 2P8+M3) and higher harmonics are rapidly attenuated, except for the 8th harmonic (3P8; 3 octaves above fundamental).

S olid body electric guitars don’t lose much string energy to the bridge. As a consequence they have a distinctive sound and are very long in sustain. Banjos on the other hand dump energy from the strings very easily to the rest of the instrument, and their characteristic sound is in large part related to that.”
— Liutaio Mottola.

T he directionality of the instrument’s sound radiation has a lot to do with banjo-ness, too, I think. Plucked string instruments have complex sound radiation patterns for various reasons. The resonant-mode frequencies of the box account for most of the radiated sound pressure. And different mode frequencies of the body have their own directional patterns, such as monopoles, dipoles, quadrupoles, and their combinations (see examples at UNSW, Joe Wolfe’s site, link below).

A nother distinctive factor is ‘masking’ caused by occultation of the sound by (and reflections from) the performer’s body. Masking plays an important role in environments where the listener (or the recording microphones) and the sound sources are positioned off-axis from each other or are freely moving with respect to each other.

T he influence of “X” vs. “Y” hand position for passages that involve the right-hand moving up the neck of the instrument is yet another factor, one I must remember to explore with my nephew when I next see him. The “X” position lends a bright timbre, and the “Y” position gives a rounder, darker quality. What the the player does with the right-hand on the head of the banjo also changes the timbre/color a lot.

A nd then there is picking technic. Fleck’s jazz-influenced single-string picking style lends an extra “impulsion” to the banjo timbre—a consequence of sympathetic acoustic coupling to and from the other un-plucked strings? The “impulsion” is one of the qualities that I am most attracted to in these recordings.

O h, the sheer exoticness of them, though! The sound calls into question the locale, the culture and politics, and the epoch of each musical text and of each of the speakers (composer, performer) and hearers. The ‘rurality’ of banjo timbre... the instrument’s architecture preserved even in the most refined, expensive ones of modern manufacture with technical polymer engineered-composite materials and high-tech strings.

T he ‘interiority’ of chamber banjo sound is radically different from the interiority of lute or harpsichord. If our own interiority is an object, then the music embodies that ‘objective’ world. Not ‘mimesis’ or ‘representation’; more like incarnation...

P hysical strings vibrate in both the vertical and the horizontal directions (well, actually, more like a lissajous curve in the plane perpendicular to the string’s length, so the polarization directions are changing and are only intermittently orthogonal to each other). If the effective length of the string is not the same in the two predominant polarization planes, we get mixing of the subsignals of slightly different frequencies, which in turn creates beat-frequency pulsations in the sound. This is a distinctive feature not only in banjo but in the Finnish kantele’s timbre as well, where the mechanism has to do with the peculiar way in which the strings have been terminated on the box.

V älimäki and colleagues emphasize that distinctive timbral properties of banjo are associated with the “attack”, the early transients in the waveform in the few tens of milliseconds immediately after the string is plucked or frailed. But there are wonderful, deeply banjo-ey aspects in the notes’ “decay” as well. We hear those in the Bullard and Fleck recordings. The ‘openness’ of these transcriptions of baroque, classical, and romantic compositions affords closer examination of those timbral spectral features than would ordinarily be possible to do in, say, idiomatic bluegrass and other banjo repertoire.

I t seems to me that these recordings of Bach and other composers’ works on banjo draw our attention to what neurophysiologists call “event fusion” (the formation of unitary musical events from the micro-evolution of waveforms on a time-scale of tens of miliseconds, too small to exhibit rhythm or voice-leading) and its inter-relationships with harmony and melody and rhythm and larger-scale form.

T hese banjo transcriptions and arrangements are unusual, musically speaking, but they register for me as very familiar in other ways. ‘Refactoring’ and ‘porting’ musical “code” from one performance “platform” to another—in the manner that Bullard and Fleck exemplify—feel to me very much like refactoring and porting computer code from one computing platform/language/operating-system/architecture to another. The process calls into question the [psychological; physical] conditions necessary for making large-scale—that is, ‘formal’—interfaces and system services-stack clear in music, just as the refactoring process does in software. The process in both cases invites or even demands reconsideration of the work’s design constructs and architectural components.

I n both, it vividly reveals the different levels of abstraction that are supported or not-so-well-supported by the different platforms. And it can uncover the essence of our interior selves, by making us pay attention to neural logic-races, multi-timescale communications phenomena, and hard-coded “antiPatterns” that the composer or performer (or listener) might not otherwise have noticed. So even if the target transcribe-to platform (banjo) manifests some antiPatterns of its own, it is still always healthy and illuminating to be outside our “comfort zones” and gleaning what we can from the refactoring process.

T he beauty and elegance of these classical banjo recordings make me want to revisit some of my own code that I have recently [re-]written; improve it; maybe understand it from novel and useful perspectives.

A ll sounds, all colours, all forms—either because of their preordained energies or because of long association—evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions.”
— W.B. Yeats, The Symbolism of Poetry.

H ow can we know the dancer from the dance?”
— W.B. Yeats.