my soul is an electromagnetic whale

My soul is an electromagnetic whale 

Swimming in spiritual space 

Coils energised, twisting 

diving into the world

radiating at certain frequencies

From the edges of my fins as I turn

I need to come up for air

That breach, that upward yearning

Pirouette in open space

Are you there, Lord?

At apogee

Far from where I'd normally be

Dancing through the Van Allen belts

Of the invisible Spirit, the aura of God

My ferrite bones, my coils thrumming

One link in a chain of spirit, 

electromagnetically charged by the next

Refilled once more by the breath of love

Gracefully,

Now full of grace

Falling back into the cold ocean

To radiate anew

Technician's curse

Technician's curse

Everything in my life

Almost works perfectly

soul lens

She is a lens of a telescope
focusing heavenly light
which she cannot herself perceive

She gathers the light
swims with it, collimating
coruscating
she cannot hold onto it,
she feels only dark
and confusion

But the light found her, chose her
when it passes through, it grows
only sweeter
and no other lens will do

No other light is better
or more lovely
or more true
than the light that shines
through the lens
of her soul.

She used to look at the stars
with her dad, and his
Telescope

And now sometimes
just sometimes
his light comes down the reflector tube
just to shine with her again

__________________________________

For my Becca,

from Morgan

The end of an unnecessarily long Reddit comment

Written as the Ritalin
Wore off completely
Half an hour before midday Monday morning
As the neglected guilty workload 

of the week was dawning

new guitar pedal day

Cutting blazing lines of fuzz
across the edge of thought
chords dripping with oblivion
neon sonic battle wrought

P̶̲̺̹̾̋̿̕L̴͔̰̫̃̐̓Ŭ̷̥̲͈̑͌ͅC̴̼̍̀̄̅K̴̗͉͇͑̀͝͝ ̸͓͙͓̍̐O̸̙͚̫̒̒͝U̶̧͔̚T̴͎͖̬̲̪͠ ̵̰͖̲̦̼̈́̈́̈́͘M̵̟̏͜Y̵̡̠̗̲̘̓́̊̐ ̶͔̀Ë̸̞̤̟̗́̂͊̅̽Y̷͕̰̮̊̎E̸͖̬̱̒Ş̵̥̣̠͔̇̈́̕

Pluck out my eyes
Want to be blind

Stumble no more

Need to be blind
To seek the truth

And stumble no more

My immodest soul
Father make whole

See only flesh
Behind closed lids

Stumble no more

Overwhelmed and terrified
Will my soul forever die

everyone relentlessly
awfully beautiful

Don't want the male gaze
Only need to see His face

P L U C K     O U T     M Y      E Y E S

Radio Monitoring System

Mount Rochfort Deva

sad electronic songbird

mating calls by email

A 'Deva' is a device that monitors several radio stations and then sends you an email if one of them is abnormal or off-air. Sometimes the Deva power supply dies slowly, and the Deva starts sending erroneous emails when the stations are actually fine. Nobody has any pressing need to be in Westport to fix it however....

Yes I took my Ritalin this morning

Stuck behind
A taxi
And a bus
A four by four
with a fear of water
And a snorkel

Stopped uncertainly
By the divine right of the sceptred hand
At the lollipop man
Citizen cones in single file
Esteemed gentlemen
From the order of the stripes
Of orange and white

Held back by
Thoughts that won't start
Mentally hovering
behind the brake lights of the bus
One LED is flickering

I am late for work
There isn't much on today
It's weird that nobody minds
I forgot what I need to do
And I haven't even started

I wish I was a bus
Or a taxi
Or a traffic cone
Honourably observing the royal procession

I wish that it felt rewarding
When the route comes back to the start
That I felt joy when the thing begins again
The holy royal twirl when the stop becomes go

I am sat at the lights
Waiting to feel fulfilled
Ready to start, ready to start being
Air-conditioned into feeling nearly okay
Nearly awake
But not quite

Yes I took my Ritalin this morning

Warning on a toaster's power cable

WARNING!
the bread may burn
red hot
like ten thousand stars
lost in a nebula or
nichrome whirlwind
The toaster should be attended when in use

Te Raikaehoe, Princess Bay

White horse heads
Roll and rumble
Caressing the shore
Neighing over the rocks

Stopping to circle
and graze on the seaweed
In the little meadows
Of the rockpools

When they're full
The herd twists and pulls
Pale manes rippling
Back out to mysterious depths

Whisked out swiftly
On gentle hooves in steely blue

Popcorn

Growing up was like walking into the end
Of a movie
Called the twentieth century

Nothing left but the PFAS
From the empty lukewarm popcorn

Maiden put out the Final Frontier
Like all music had now finished
Songs soaring into final black abyss

I asked about noisy guitars
Slow chords like shimmering bricks
In monolithic walls of noise,

We did that in the eighties!
They laughed
Said I had to be there

All the maps had been drawn
All the continents found
All the poles scraped
Lunar litter already left

The careers counselor
Had me fill out a survey
There aren't any jobs
we can match you with

Every path had been trodden
Every road needs refinishing
The council never upgraded the pipes
In the heyday of prosperity
We were conceived during.

Now we ride the rollercoaster
Of blown out dopamine
Microplastic surprises
Cost of living crisis

And unwanted advice
From a century we were never invited to.
We can't afford the popcorn now
And we don't have time for movies

Mouseybro

Mouseybro
sleeps
in the oven at night
pops out for a peek
when no movement of light

disturbs his little world
his warm steel home
his toes on the burner
fan by his nose

I know he's in there
though I've never seen him
he leaves little gifts
like seeds of his presence

Fracture

During Lent

A soul
Washed up as jetsam
At a high tide

And as the waters recede
I am lodged in a pew
I am here, Lord
I sorry that it took
your whole ocean to move me
But I am glad that it did

Executive Dysfunction

Am I-
I-
Am I?
I want to
I want to start
I want to know how to start
I want to want to know how to start
I know I should start
I am guilty that I cannot start
I want to create easily
To flow from one good thing into another thing that is good
To fail gracefully

I sit in the ashes of doubt
I can only turn and not accelerate
creatively blind
Well fed and exhausted
Mind frozen and broken into pieces
each piece thinking in loops unconnected

I don't want to do what I am doing
And I don't know what I want to do

Racktopia

Welcome to Racktopia
Where copper-fingered
aspiring wire-gardeners
trim over-grown looms
into beautiful rack-topiaries

Migraine daydream

My feet are planted firmly between
mind-rattling throbs,
those BEATS of pain
like injuries in the inbox
of your cognition.

I am standing in the middle of a bridge

Gently the top half of the skull separates
and rises,
the split forming slowly backwards
from the outside corners of the eyes

The cranium lifts up and back,
wisps of steam curl away
from the underside

The brain rises gently
like a flower in time lapse
the folds open out and forbidden air
begins to dance through them

The eyes lift heavenward and forwards
still tenuously connected to the brain
totally free of the skull
coloured static pulses indigo with the heartbeat

A cool Antarctic breeze
Christchurch, in June, at 10 in the morning.
When the frost is still barely clinging
to the grass, and the wind is no faster than a walk

Relief falls from the remains of the tear ducts
the pain begins to tumble away
bark falling off a eucalyptus

I fall
head dismantled and finally, perfectly cool
right off the bridge and into the Heathcote river

Gently swept out by the breathing of the tides
and the diligent paddling of the ducks

diving for their lunch

out into the comfortable dark Pacific

Overwrought

When I open the fridge
The light does not come on


Words on the page
Lose their captivation


Single bulb on the porch
All the moths are gone


Empty webs in the wind
Spiders left before dawn


Turn key in the slot
Starts once and then dies


There's no fuel in the tank
No cash in the bank


Pick up the guitar
Cry on the floor


Notes have all left me
Gone out the door


The windows are leaking
The pipes are on strike


And the roof is not far behind.


Fists have been lifted
Like antennas to heaven


The station is off
And the bread hasn't risen


Take to the streets
An inappropriate hour


Sit by the water
With a furrowed brow


Amid fires of thought
And spirals of doubt


Cold hits the bone
The moon has gone out


Take me far away

make me someone else

make someone else be me.

the noise is so deafening

on this most silent of nights

Pickup slugs

Pickup slugs like
silent ferrite judges

hidden fields 

touchlessly caressing,

grabbing hold

of the six steel souls

in all their enharmonic

and inharmonic moods

the jury is four thousand ohms

they don't like the defendant

oh, my volume knob was down.

Gregariousnesses

 Diminutive 

g

G

Gr

Gre

Egg

Actual

Reg

Greg

Gregor

Gregory

Extended

Gredger

Grëëëëg

Gregorios

Gregurtha

Greggsson

Gregormatic

Greggstopher

Gregstravaganza

Greggggggggggggggg

Gregiddywreggiddywrecked

Greggthemanthemyththelegend

SaintGregoryTheGreat64thBishopofRome

Wheelie bins

Wheelie bins
popped up silently
in the gentle dark
fruiting bodies
of a suburban mycelium

Embraced

They separated as the daffodil buds began to bloom
in the chill early springtime

a year apart in stony aphelion,
still orbiting

Upon the daffodils' return,
they embraced

Emergency

Ambulances like white blood cells
patrolling the arterial asphalt
down the lonely avenues and
suburbs of the city's circulatory system

WORK TOGETHER

WORK TOGETHER- an interactive audio installation

WORK TOGETHER is intended to encourage people to work together, and rewards them for doing so by playing a sound that is more than the sum of its parts. WORK TOGETHER is an audio installation built from recycled furniture, broken bicycle wheels, an old speaker, and an Arduino Nano.

Turning one wheel causes a note (always the same pitch) to slowly get louder. Spinning the other wheel does the same, although this second note is a major third above the first one. Spinning both wheels plays both notes, as well as five more, forming a dense major seventh chord. This pleasant chord rewards the two people for interacting and working together.

The speed of the wheels is detected by small momentary buttons which are hit by pieces of rubber on the wheels (shown above). The Arduino figures out how often this happens and generates a tone. Each wheel has it's own tone, and if both are spun together, the Arduino puts out a big major seventh chord. These signals are manually bit-banged out of the Arduino, run through a tone knob (pot+filter cap) and then amplified by an LM386 chip, which powers the speaker. All of this runs off a 9V battery.

Above: The control plate inside the box of the installation (shown detached) with an output jack, power switch and LED, volume knob, tone knob, and input jack respectively (from left to right). The cable ties hold the 9V battery in place.

Below: The Arduino nano and LM386 amplifier. These are not currently functioning properly.

The use of recycled materials is important in this installation because it means that the installation has no environmental footprint whatsoever. No extra energy was expended to produce the parts for this project, apart from maybe the electronics. Everything else was recycled (the wooden table used to be two couch squares), the wheels were headed for the landfill (the rims are too damaged to ever be roadworthy again) and the speaker was harvested from an old broken guitar amplifier. The important thing about building public installations from recycled materials is that it sets an example for what can be achieved purely with recycled materials. Many artists have already been concerned with this, and rather than avoiding it as passé or cliché I think it’s important to join them.

While the project does not address any particular ecological issue, what it does have is an essentially social focus which is critical for engaging ecological issues. In order to work together on tackling planetary issues of human consumption and pollution, we need to learn to work together as individual people first. The intention of this installation is to provide a fun and interesting experience that the user/interactor can take away and remember.

Link to video of the installation in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGhwSP9-1rY

Thanks to:

Bike Barn on Tory Street for providing the wheels.

Chris Wratt for helping me get my head around scheduling on an Arduino.

My fiancé for tolerating this weird-looking this with wheels on in the living room.

Fog (sonifying everyday life)

Fog (sonifying everyday life)

link to video

Activity Sonifier

This program listens to your mouse and keyboard inputs and plays different sections of soundscape to accompany your activities, based on the type of input (arrow keys, numbers, letters etc) and the frequency of those inputs. This provides a complex and lush sonic accompaniment to help you focus on your everyday activities.

How the program works:

The various inputs (letters, numbers/symbols, arrow keys, mouse buttons and modifier keys) are processed so that when an input event happens (let's say a letter key is pressed) then the input section spits out a number, based on the type of input (for a letter key, the input section would put out a 1). This prevents the program from logging your exact data, which is important.

The last 100 input events (or rather, the type of input events) are stored in an array. A cpu timer is sampled every time an input event happens, and the time between the new event and the previous event is stored. The times between the last 100 input events are stored in a similar array.

If statements figure out which type of input event is currently the most common type of input event stored in the array. The current most common type of input event dictates the kind of sounds being triggered. The mean (average) time between the input events is calculated from the data stored in the time array. This mean time is fed into a clock, which decides how often a sound should be triggered (the mean time is multiplied by 50).

There are 40 different 2-minute sounds that can be triggered. These are in five sets of eight, with each set corresponding to a type of input. The sounds have long fades on each end to create a smooth listening experience.

For example, if the most common type of input is currently the WASD/arrow keys, and the mean time between input events is 350ms, then a sound from the arrow key set will be triggered every 35 seconds (the mean time is multiplied by 50). If every sound in a set is already playing, the program does nothing. As soon as a sound finishes it can be triggered again, regardless of the state of the other sounds in the set.

Sounds

Five tracks were used in the program. Each track is tied to an input type. Within each input type, the speed of each track is altered. This makes a similar-sounding collection of related soundscapes for each input type. This could easily have been more complex (with eight completely different sounds for each input type) but in the interest of filesize and compositional consistency this simple solution was found.

Descriptions of each track:

Letters:

Ambient music provided in CMPO 211.

Numbers/Symbols:

Found sounds of the air-conditioning system on the fifth floor of the library in Kelburn.

Arrow keys/WASD:

My soldering iron makes a very quiet hum, which switches back and forth between a few different notes.

Mouse buttons:

Found sounds, dripping noises from a bathroom at the NZSM. Also present are birds chirping.

Modifier keys:

Ambient track mentioned above.

All of these tracks were processed in Reaper so that they can be played continuously, as well as some cleanup/EQ and spatialisation.

This program currently only works if the user has the Max window (can be any Max window) in focus. The original dream for this program was that it could listen to the mouse and keyboard while the user is going about their other activites on their machine, and provide a comfortable sonic background to their acitivities. Implementing this is difficult but I would really finish the project.

Also, the sounds are quite limited, which makes the program feel stale after just a few minutes of use. A future version of this program could refer to a vast online library of soundscapes, bringing the listener unfamiliar music every time the program is run. Another option would be to make the sound libraries selectable by the user. Sounds could also be generated within Max itself, stochastically.

One goal for the program is to make it sensitive to different frequency of user input. If the user is typing frantically the sounds should be thick and complicated; but if there are long pauses between input events (for example of the user is reading an article, scrolling slowly) then the sound should become thinner. This is currently only crudely implemented, and there could be a much finer, broader dynamic range to this sensitivity.

Finally, the other thing that the program really needs in future is the ability to run as a standalone application. This vastly widens the pool of people who could easily download and use the program, and if kept open-source the users could modify to suit their needs.

The program, as a whole and despite some limitations (particularly the fact that the user has to have a Max window in focus) works surprisingly well. The dynamic range of the combined sounds is not quite properly mapped to the frequency of user inputs, but it does work. The overall wonderful noisy mess of the whole thing (especially when you change the kind of input type) is quite complex and immersive, and lacks any kind of sharp, transient sounds that would distract the user.

The purpose of the program is to provide a listening environment that helps the user focus on the tasks at hand, and stops them from being distracted from extraneous noise. Not all users need this kind of aural distraction or filler but with the success of video game music that is intended to help focus and to immerse you, and with the prevalence and wide-spread acceptedness of these kinds of interfaces and experiences, I felt that it was worthwhile to create a simple program that does just this.

Headphone Array

Here is a video of this in action.

Overview

The Headphone Array is an interactive sound installation. Users are invited to come, plug their headphones in, and listen. The more people that plug in (maximum of nine) the more interesting the music becomes: With each new user, an extra layer of music is added. It doesn’t matter which jack you plug into; they are all identical. The project aims to reduce the solitary isolation of headphone listening and create a memorable and interactive experience.

The box itself is powered by an Arduino Uno with sparkfun’s mp3 shield and a behringer headphone amp. The music is written in ChucK and Reaper, using simple synthesis and compositional techniques.

Motivation

A common way to listen to music these days is to carry a select bunch of songs with you, and listen to them through headphones or earbuds. Like many things in a commercial/industrial society, this isn’t a bad way to do it; but it’s lacking several things. While portable, this listening style prevents people from listening together (splitters do exist but they’re not particularly common), and the music is not locked to a particular location. Memories of music in particular places or situations are often stronger than the music you can take with you: Live gigs will stay with you the rest of your life, but you’ll forget about that song you listened to on the bus this morning as soon as you get to work.

This project aims to repair some of those emotional ties that have been lost with modern headphone-based listening by fixing the sound to a particular location (wherever it is installed) and by making the piece interactive and collaborative (the prescence of each listener alters the sounds). Listeners are encouraged to interact with the installation on their own terms (i.e. with their own headphones) and also to interact and listen with one another.

Related Works

It is difficult to find other sound installation works as they are few and far between. However, two pieces were critical in the formation of this project: Mort Garson’s Plantasia album, and Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony. The best way to describe Garson’s work is ‘lovely’. It consists almost exclusively of beautiful analog 70s synthesisers, arranged in pretty rhythmic patterns. There is a certain kind of peace to the music; it claims to be music for plants and exhibits a certain kind of emotional healing. This is very much a concern of this project; the music must be peaceful and inclusive and just plainly beautiful.

Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony is an algorithmic piece, written for a single small chip mounted with a button cell and a headphone jack inside a CD case. Perich says that just because the sounds present (triangle waves, square waves etc) are simple, that the music itself doesn’t have to be simplistic. His piece is very musically complex, but is entirely based around simple synthesis. This, combined with the headphone listening method, and the fact that the music is tied intricately with the location where it is made (the CD case), makes it stand out among other sonic arts projects.

Both Garson and Perich seek to heal damage that has been done; and they do this by making music that is simply beautiful. This project sought to achieve the same effect, and reinforced it through user interaction and collaboration.

Technical Overview

Construction

The layout of various circuits in the box.

Components:

Arduino with MP3 Shield

Distro and Line Out board

Behringer HA400 Headphone Amp

Car USB Charger

9 Headphone jacks, each one with a momentary button hot-glued to the back of them (such that the button pokes into the back of the jack).

Signal Flow

The stereo signal comes from the MP3 Shield, down a cable and some headers to the distro board, where it is split between the line out circuit and one of the headphone outputs (more on this later). From the DC offset/line out circuit, the stereo signal goes across the box to the Behringer headphone amp. This amp splits it into 4 and amplifies/buffers the signal, which goes back across the box (4 separate cables, each with L,R, and ground) back to the distro board, where each channel from the amp is split and sent to two of the headphone outputs. With 4 channels on the amp and each one powering two headphone outputs, the extra headphone output was simply powered by the MP3 Shield itself.

Each of the headphone jacks has a single 3-core cable (L, R and ground) soldered and hot-glued to it, and ending in a 3-pin male header. These headers all plug into a large 2x14 pin female header on the distro board.

Power

The Behringer headphone amplifier board required 12V, which worked well because 12V-5V converters are very easy to find. A Car USB charger was used to step this down, which was good because while the Arduino’s regulator can technically handle 12V, it gets very hot and can reduce the lifespan of the Arduino. The only problem was fitting everything in the box, which took a few calculated guesses before I got the cable lengths right.

Code

The Arduino is constantly polling the jacks. When a change is read, the Arduino stops the current track, counts how many jacks are down (plugged in), and plays the corresponding track from the SD card on the MP3 shield. Then it goes back to polling. This was surprisingly difficult to implement, and several weeks were spent troubleshooting the code. It compares two different arrays with each loop, and writes one to the other at the end of the loop. Each array is 9 positions long and contains the data from each jack (when I say jack here, I mean the state of the momentary button on the back of it). The ground wires on those jack buttons are daisy-chained together, and the signal wires go to pins 0,1,5,10,A0,A1,A2,A3 and A4. The other digital pins are all used by the synchronous serial system used for communication between the Arduino and the MP3 shield.

The 9 tracks of music were written in ChucK using very simple synthesis and compositional techniques. Midi notes were stored in arrays, which were then fed to oscillators. Various delays and reverbs were used, with the intention of making calming music that drew the listeners in. The tracks were mixed in Reaper.

Line Out System

Because of how the MP3 shield works, the ground of it’s output isn’t actually 0V, it’s actually 1.25V. The hookup guide on the Sparkfun page had a comprehensive guide on how to build a circuit to remove the DC offset:

Future Work

More headphone-specific music needs to be made. Headphones are wonderful things that allow listeners to experience sounds without distracting or annoying anyone around them, and can immerse the listener into a total sound world. The interesting thing about this project was that the music itself is stored on an SD card on the MP3 Shield, so technically any music could be used as long as it fitted on the SD card.

Project Report for Stockholm Syndrome For City Hum

Utting CMPO 306 Major 2 Project Report

Stockholm Syndrome For City Hum
Video: https://youtu.be/Q0XE3_TrpCU

Successes and failures

•The most noticeable success (for me) with this piece was the creative stability that came from basing the whole piece around a score. In the past it was very difficult as part of the improvisatory/compositional process to record anything at all. Everything that would possibly go wrong did, and by the time I got everything working satisfactorily I had lost two hours and run out of creative energy. Using a score meant that the technical documentation of the piece did not interfere with the flow of generative and selective creativity, which was very freeing.

•Complete flexibility of notation was key to this piece’s construction. For a long time I sort of shunned musical notation (beyond primitive guitar tab and basic performance instructions) because of the negative influence it can have on the interaction between performer and the sound they’re sculpting. In each of the 16 events (they’re not really bars) in the piece, time is fluid and the sounds are represented by colours.

•The piece is difficult to replicate. The hum was often surprisingly different; not just in the character of it but the level too, and exponentially more so towards the end of each event and the end of the piece.

•The bass guitars would often produce slightly different harmonic beating rhythms, which changed the character of different phrases. The tuning of both instruments had to be carefully reset between takes. It was well worth doing though because the altered tunings offered some fantastic rhythmic information, especially when sustained with the compressor.

•Using the hums and buzzes that were present (rather than working technically to minimise them in the middle of a creative flow) was a suprisingly natural process in which the equipment was explored with both curiosity and presicion. This should be taken to much greater lengths, and is something that would really help with slow/drone music in general.

Creative method and workflow

•The piece spent a lot (too much; months) of time in limbo before it was finally nailed down. An engineering approach turned out to be the best: The piece simply needed to exist, and it needed to have a function and fulfill it well. To be anything more than that would hinder it’s purpose. That function was to illustrate the sounds present by approaching them phenomenologically and unfolding them in a logical fashion for the listener.

•The piece was originally going to be for one bass guitar and ChucK (real-time musical porgramming language) but it was difficult to find a reliable, simple way to make ChucK respond to and interact with a live performer. Several short programs were experimented with but to take them further seemed like it would lead to a different kind of project. Instead, seeing as I have two basses, it occurred to me that maybe I could tune them slightly apart from one another and just play those.

•Having a dedicated space to work in really helped with the creative process. Packing the gear down between sessions basically had the effect of changing the piece every time. It didn’t change it a lot, but it was just enough that it got very confusing as to what the piece was actually going to be. It was easy to get off topic and ultimately cost me several weeks in a fairly heavy creative block. Leaving everything set up meant that when I returned to it, it still sounded the same and responded in the same ways. This drastically improved creative flow.

•I find it really easy to find a sound or tone I like, and a few note combinations that illuminate it. Larger structures are more difficult. Notes (not the musical kind) and chords that worked well together (following each other) were written down in google docs, which was left open the whole time; including the times when I wasn’t actively working on the piece. This is something I’m going to try and do for every project in future. It meant that tweaks and passing thoughts could easily be slipped in.

•The tab-based system was great because it worked in a text editor, rather than on paper or in a midi program. The blue and yellow colours were added later by hand, and serve as a description of the levels of the two sounds at any given time (the two sounds being the guitars and the hums). I wasn’t sure if they were neccessary but it was clear when it came to the recording: I could stay in a technical mindset while playing (setting levels, camera and mic positions etc.) and let my past (creative state) self unfold from the page. The colours made the score more visually interesting and easier to follow.

Tips for future work:

•It might sound weirdly simple, but use Chion’s Reduced Listening technique. If you like to play within an established musical context, it’s the only way to truly know what your gear is capable of. In this piece it transformed the background hum from a dreaded lump in my heart to a volatile instrument full of worth and fascination.

•Leave everything set up and the files open. This preserves the nature of the piece.

•Make snap, rash decisions for creative reasons. If for whatever reason it doesn’t work later, you’ve learned something about yourself and your sounds and you know how to fix it.

•Have a day (or a week) without Reddit and other social media. You’ll need content so badly you’ll make it yourself, and you’ll make sure it’s good.

•Max out your compressor. You’re making new music, not fixing kick drums. There’s a whole world above that threshold.

The most important thing I gained in writing this work:

•The fast/cheap/good triangle is a lie. With large creative works, a lot of work done quickly is rewarding, exciting, and bound together by it’s temporal proximity to itself; resulting in a homogenous and thorough creation.

Stockholm Syndrome For City Hum- A piece for 1 player with 2 bass guitars.

This post is the score for this piece of music. A video performance of it can be found here. The piece consists of 16 actions over about 6 minutes. The performer interacts with the 'natural' hum of the gear. You're welcome to play it whenever or wherever you like, but please attribute it according to the standard creative commons attribution license. Also please let me know :)

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME FOR CITY HUM

This piece is a metaphor for those hums and other buzzes we hear that we have little to no control over; those ambiguous sounds we hear in the night, in the city. Inspiration for this piece came from a sound I hear every day, through every speakers in my house. This sound is apparently some reset signal for hot water cylinders. This intermittent, quasi-rhythmic hum is both infuriating and pervasive. It is so constantly and obviously present that it sometimes becomes comforting.

Gear:

2 Bass Guitars (1 player)

Compressor (10:1 ratio, min threshold, min attack, max release, +10dB). I use an Alesis 3630.

Powerful Bass Amp

Crowther Hotcake overdrive pedal or similar. (level at unity, max tone, drive at 2 o’clock)

Routing:

Bass 1 => Compressor => Hotcake => Amp input

Bass 2 => Compressor

You will need a y-cable or connector for this. Also required are 4 jack leads (2 can be patch cables).

Instrument Setup:

Wear both bass guitars with straps as you would normally do, but push Bass 2 to the right-hand side (reverse this for left-handed playing). Bass 2 will is not fretted at all in the piece, so only the plucking hand is needed for it. Bass 1 is worn and played normally, with both hands.

Much of this piece consists of controlled low-frequency feedback (the compressor really helps with this) and thus the player’s proximity to the amp is crucial. At more than 2m distance the amp would have to exceed a safe listening level for the notes to sustain properly.

The other thing that the player is controlling is the hum/buzz. When this high-gain system receives no signal, it amplifies whatever it can find, resulting in a buzz. In the score, The notated dynamics relate only to the strength with which the strings are plucked. The blue represents the guitar signal, and the yellow represents the hum. The line between the colours describes the length of time that the notes should linger before the hum creeps in. This is mostly controlled by the timing (indicated at the start of each bar) and the velocity with which the strings are plucked (notated as dynamics markings) but in sparse music like this a visual indication of what’s going on is very useful.

The ‘touch’ and ‘no metal’ markings indicate whether the player should be grounding the metal on the guitar or not. Any metal part on the instrument is fine. Most electric guitars and basses have a buzz when they’re not grounded to the player (usually through the strings). Letting this buzz come through and hit the compressor is a large part of the aesthetic of the piece.

Tunings:

Both basses are downtuned. The F string on Bass 1 is a tone below the G it would usually be in standard tuning. The low B on Bass 2 is a fourth below the E that it would be in standard.

Bass 1: Bass 2:

F2 E2

B1 B1

F#1 F#1

C#1 B0