On the Development of Instruments

In my early posts you can find many posts criticizing the whole notion of additive synthesis for the very simple reason that it is not really possible. I will not get into the reasons here to avoid mathematics which most don't have a background in.

As a clarification, I do own Alchemy because I find it's application of additive synthesis useful. However, I find the whole notion of describing sound in terms of partials to be of only limited use. I also find waveforms while essential for analogue synthesis to again have limited value for describing natural sounds.

For the most part, when we hear a sound, it is the attack transient that our brains use to determine what instrument is being played. Lets do a thought experiment. Take a number of orchestral instruments and have a group of musicians begin to play them together but separated by a few measures and then stop playing in the same manner. Experiments have show that it is relatively easy to distinguish when each instrument started but difficult to distinguish when each finishes.

The truth is simply this. It is the attack transient that we use to distinguish an instrument and not the much more stable waveform during the sustain or decay part of a note.

So if waveforms don't help and partials don't help much in understanding sound what does? My theory is that by studying the dynamics of transients and their underlying physical properties one can develop a means of classifying sounds that is far more natural and corresponds to how we hear sounds rather than how they can be expressed with mathematics. So in studying instruments historically I can find a basis to begin to describe how sound changes and how that can be used musically.

This is where I find myself drawn to musically and many times my music also is truly experimental in that I am learning as well as creating.

This is not my only interest musically. I am also very interested in how music creates an emotional response. I also have an interest in orchestration but these will have to be for future blogs.

Comments are always most welcome.

Shake, Rattle and Role

Sometimes I find as an electronic musical artist that I can get so wrapped up in the technical aspects of my music that I forget the simple joys of sounds. As many of you might now, I have a great deal of appreciation for what music therapists do. One aspect of their work is their delight in simple musical instrument. For example, I have really enjoyed "Building a Rhythm Band on a Budget" from Natalie Mullis, a certified music therapist and also Kat Fulton's blogs about Boomwhackers and drum circles.

Their influence has been so great that I now have built my own rhythm band complete with egg shakers, boomwhackers and even a giant boomwhacker. Of course, no electronic artist can resist the mangling of samples into something new but working with the raw sounds has taught be a lot.

Lets take egg shakers for example. They have been around for a very long time. Well, not really egg shakers in modern plastic motif but rattles that seem to dominate every culture going back to the time man first learned to bang two rocks together. Many have used hollowed out goards with some material inside to make an effective rattle.

In her video Natalie observes that the egg shaker is non distinct, that it has no sharp rhythm so it's good for children as they learn to develop their sense of rhythm. In a sense, egg shakers are a form of granular synthesizer. The beads inside the egg act literally like the grains of granular synthesis. The same principle is true of rain sticks, ocean drums and and Maracas.

What is interesting is how prevalent the broader term "rattle" appears in many cultures throughout musical history. On my vacation in a few weeks I plan on visiting the Metropolitan Museum of art which has a very large collection of instruments including, yes, several rattles. The books I also have on musical instruments show how prevalent the rattle has been in musical history.

Another musical instrument I have found to be a favorite of music therapists is the Boomwhacker. While in some sense this is a children's toy, it has many ties to other instruments. For example, I have been using an effect called corpus and a synthesizer called Prism which act like waveguides in a sense much as these two synths and effects do.

Prism uses an impulse, comb filtering and a feedback look. The impulse is very much like striking the Boomwhacker with a hand. Corpus has a tube option which also behaves like sound played through a Boomwhacker.

It's clear that observations of simple instrument provide a useful framework for talking about the development of instruments new and old.

On Music Therapy

For a while now I have been fascinated by the work of Music Therapists. They are good people trying to help others using an art form that I hold dear to my own heart, music. I also am attracted to their simplicity in how they use music for therapy. At times I like to get past the knobs and sliders of my art form and enjoy a video that delights in the simple sound of a drum.

For a while now, I have also been interested in the psychological aspects of music. Music therapists use basic musical ideas in their work to bring healing and joy to others. In many ways it helps me at times to focus on my own music. Every time I compose music I am drawing on emotions and memories. Music for me is often self exploration, sound exploration and personal exploration and sharing.

However, what I don't share with music therapists is a desire to define my art. When I create music it's no holes barred. I use all sort of ways of getting the sounds I want. That said, many of the videos I have watched and blogs I have read on music therapy I use as starting off points to create something new. I take a basic form such as the beating of a particular drum and discover a broader musical context in the Electronic Music art form.

There is also nothing more rewarding that to meet people personally. In getting to know other artists I have found a common kinship with other sonic explorers. When navigating the unexplored country, there is no particular discipline. We have no conferences, committees, guidelines or standards. We just create. We so come together but to share, not limit, define or dissect.

In my discussions with music therapists and electronic artists I advocate for Music Therapy with fellow artists I but also share my art and others with music therapists. As much as I have found that music therapy enriches my art, it is my hope that what myself and fellow artists do can enrich music therapy.

I have found that what can be a strength can also be a weakness. As an electronic artist, I realize that much of what in do is unmapped and lacking a solid discipline, a weakness. But the strength is that as artists, we, in the words of a Santana song, are soul birds that fly in infinity sky. I see no boundaries for my music or the music of other electronic artists.

Music therapists are very discipled. However, in their strong desire to be respected, they often create walls around their good work. This is a limitation. As I share my world I am in doing so inviting Music Therapists to see with my eyes and hear with my ears and to join me in opening up the field of Music Therapy to the unexplored country. I want to assure Music Therapists of my continued support and respect but also invite you to fly with me in the infinity sky of electronic music and perhaps, we can cultivate some gardens outside the walls. You would be most welcome to visit the Electro Music Festival this year and give a presentation and allow us to share our music with you. If you are interested, let me know. We had a drum circle last year to :). I would love to bring our worlds together.

Animmog - Hype or Game Changer

As with most things in life, I suspect that the truth about Animoog somewhere between the hype and the reality. Is Animoog a great I synth? Absolutely! I would expect nothing less from the Moog. Am I going to toss out my hard synths and soft synth and wait for the I revolution to usher in a new world of synthesizers? Don't hold your breath.

The Animoog is the best sounding I synth I have heard. I give it a 10+ for that. For creativity, also a ten plus. It makes great use of the touch pad and great video to make for a stunning performance environment. The ability to see visually what is happening with the sound and to see the waveform is a fantastic idea. Again 10+

Ok, that is as far as I go on the hype side. In terms of filters it's limited and it only has a single filter. If it were a sot synth, this would not be overlooked but I synths seem to get a pass. It has very limited filter types. When I saw the filters in Abynth, I thought I had gone to filter heaven.

The envelops are simple ADSR types and they can't be assigned. There is also only a single LFO. Being able to select continuously between shapes is nice but the shapes themselves are standard fair. As far as I can see you can't make your own and you can't see them outside the oscilloscope.

Am I expecting to much for an I synth? That's my point. I Moog wants to use I synths to compete with soft synth, IMHO they failed. If they wanted to make a fantastic I synth that raises the bar for I synths and does some really impressive things, then they have done a fantastic job. In the end, I guess it's a matter of hype or function.

Too Many Knobs

I ind it interesting when I think back to how my style of composing and playing music has changed. I used to just find a preset I like, one of my own or sometimes a factory preset, and then play music with it. The art was in the notes and a limited amount of control (velocity, pitch bend and mod wheel). Knob turning was left to tweaking presets before the performance of the music.

With a DAW like Ableton Live its certainly possible to tweak parameters in real time and have the DAW record those changes. But dealing with a large number of parameters in real time is a daunting task. For this reason, a number of software synths now offer performance controllers. A convenient set of knobs or sometimes XY pads with which certain key parameters can be changed in real time with the idea that these changes are part of the musical performance.

Native Instruments did with this Kore which I always thought was a great idea but sadely Native Instruments has decided to drop Kore. Each Kore instrument has a limited set of controls. A similar idea is built into Massive and Abynth from the same company. Camel Audio's Alchemy has a performance controller section with a controller that looks very similar to Kore's that allow you to morph between different settings of the perofmance controls. Albeton Live itself offers instrument racks with performane controllers.

These only serve as examples of a capability that I am sure has been built into many soft synths. So we see now the musican also acting as conductor. So the art of the sound designer, musician and conductor/orchestrator have now been combined.

I'd Give It a Ten But You Can't Dance to It

I am writing this latest blog post to provide some impression, thoughts, conclusions and other such meanderings on what I experienced in Heugenot this year at the Electro-Music festival. I have been to the festival now for two years although I trucated my first visit. What impressed me the most about the festival is that I found a group of people who did what I do that is make "electronic music'.

"Electronic Music" has been around now for a long time but clearly defining what exactly it is is perhaps left to better philosophers than me. However, what was clear to me was that what I was listening to at this festival was not "dance music". If anyone came to the festival expectiing dance music and for example listened to Richard Lainhart would be sadly out of there musical element.

I am a would be student of Electronic Music history. I believe it has its roots more in classical music than any pop movement although the difficulty with defining it today is that is has been entrangled with pop and yes, with dance music. But the odd thing is that for the most part, those who write it don't write dance music. I know I am not making sense here but I guess what I am trying to say ever so badly is that while some people who make other kinds of music would call themselves electronic artists there is an "electronic music" that is a true genre however broad and ill definted. That genre is what I heard at the Electro Music festival and why I felt at home there. With people who where trying to do a version of what I do whatever that is.

A little side note here with a purpose. Its funny. I support and truely appreciate what music therapists do. They seem so together in clearly defining what they do to the point of having a certification process. I also appreciate the difference between therapist and artist and at times, I also find that desire to clarity everthing in music therapy a weakness as well. It seems closed in on itself and unable to benefit from other directions that might help expand it and allow it to grow.

No I come to the point of this blog. The "whatever that is" part. One thing that can be said of classical music is that through each era, each incarnation, each century there has been a way to define it. A set of methods, practices, ect. As music came to the 20th century, those practices began to dissolve. Despite the attempts of serialism, classical music took many different directions including it's spinoff, "Electronic Music", at least that is how I see it.

But now we have what? Drone music, space music, new age, krautrock, experimental, ok, i'm not going to give an extensive list but you get the idea. Defining what it is that we do is very difficult. But more than that, talking about it is even more difficult. If you want to talk about Bach you pull out sheet music. There it is. OK, sure, there is some degree of interpretation but for the most part what a classical composer composes is sheet music (to illustrate a point).

What an electronic artist does is programming, finding new instruments, finding new controllers, layering sounds, again, the list could go on and on. So where to we from here? I don't know but perhaps this blog is an invitation to some to start talking about what is is that we do as electronic artists so that we can pull out the electronic music equivalent of sheet music (at least metaophoricaly) and for the reall great music proclaim: "I'd give it a 10 but you can't dance to it" and so it goes...

What's Old is New Again

I think sometimes in a world of quickly moving technology we often believe that if we just keep moving forward that things will improve. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't but as I a writing this blog, I am listening to an instrument made my Hammond called the Novachord. This instrument is truely haunting and beautiful. It reminds me of another beautiful instrument called the Ondes Martenot. It seems a strange turn of events that just recently these instrument have been revived both physically and in sample form. Hollow Sun and Sonic Couture both offer sampled versions of the Nova Chord and Sonic Couture has a sample Ondes. There is also the French Connection which is an actually hardware CV controller that works like the original Ondes. No doubt the design for the Haken Continuum is at least inspired by this instrument.

A Twitter friend reminded me recently in a great blog just how useful "old school" techniques can be. In her case, she found a variation on a "old school" roladex a very effective way to keep track of business cards. Both the Novachord and the Ondes Martenot are both very old school and yet, by modern standards perhaps they don't have the range of many modern synthesizers but they also don't have the annoying property that they also sound like every other synthesizers. In a musical world that claims to be cutting edge, I often find that the real game if you want to make the big bucks is sound almost like everything else but put a little twist in it, not to much, so your music gets a notice.

For me, I have been enjoying some instruments from the past, "old school" instruments that don't sound the same. I guess I like them because I feel inspired by them. Hopefully I can use them in my music in the future and break away from the pack by going back to the future, sampled "old school" here I come.