Even my Song

January 27th, 2012
 

Even my Song is a piece better than a decade in the making! David Prete was a poet friend I hung out with for a couple years in the late 90′s and he gave me several poems to set to music. This is one of them which I took a lot of mix and match liberty with as I sung them. This is a rock song in 17 equal (17 edo) at the request of Mike Battaglia that uses super major thirds among other chords. Below the poem I will have the chords and bass line – you’ll have to figure out my leads yourself – my memory is not that good. The line up is drums, rythmn and lead and bass guitars (whammy pedal on 17 edo guitar) plus vocals. Yeah the verse rhythm is a bit like Buddy Holly but if you are going to copy someone you might as well copy one of the best ever :-) – and yes I wish so much my voice was better…..

Sharing dreams and fantasies
and secret lives we’ll never lead

knowing where we’ve been before
we need no keys to open doors

sunshine sparkles in your eyes
keeps me floating keep me alive

rains falls but I don’t feel no rain
again and again you save me from the pain

loves calls there’s only one voice I hear
I know you’re coming closer cause I feel no fear

days gone
return again
no just to haunt us
but to clue us in
love lost, now my life is gone
everything must end, even my song

by

    David Prete

circa 1998

Guitar
Verse chords E – G – D – D – E (all 17 edo 424 cent super major 3rds)
Chorus Chords C – Bm minor 7 – G^ 4 member quartal chord – A^ 4 member quartal chord
Break G – D – F – G – D – F – G – D -F – G – A – all 4ths over an open D string

Bass
Verse E – G – B – D – E
Chorus C – B – Bv – A^
Break [ D - F - G - F - D] [D - A]

15-Minutes-to-12: pieces pour la fin du monde

January 27th, 2012
 

Hi, I will have an electronic composition played at the February 12, 2012 Composer’s Voice concert

From about 0:16 to 0:23 you can hear an excerpt of my microtonal piece The Whimpering End of the World. After the concert I will release the full length piece here on my website. Right now I am asking for those visitors who live in the New York area to consider attending the Vox Novus concert at the Jan Hus Church, 351 East 74th Street, New York City. Thanks!

A Galaxy Teeming With Life

January 25th, 2012
 

A Galaxy Teeming With Life is a composition made by manipulating a Hubble space telescope picture, manipulating a sample of Francesca from 8Dio and creating a new tuning that is 256 harmonics of every odd harmonic from 3 without reducing to an octave and combining all of this in AudioPaint with some normalization on the back end. The resulting piece is very odd (and has a large dynamic range so turn it up). The closest reference I can give you is Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict” without the Scottish accented monolog.

and pseudonym made the bullets

January 24th, 2012
 

and pseudonym made the bullets => 17 equal guitar, loop station, whammy pedal, distortion pedal, Garritan world sample set. There is one point early on where a single note gets quite strong – I tried to fix it without making more of a blemish.

Blues in 17

January 23rd, 2012
 

Blues in 17 is a classical finger picked blues / classical guitar solo hybrid with lexicon reverberation and freeze pedal. There is some sloppiness. The idea was to push myself in playing and what I was playing melodically and harmonically.

A New Leaf

January 11th, 2012
 



A New Leaf
is a piano improvisation using the circulating temperament 15-note lesfip mutant nusecond, target 11-limit diamond, error limit 12 cents which is shown below.

! nufip15.scl
!
A 15-note lesfip mutant nusecond, target 11-limit diamond, error limit 12 cents
15
!
44.85398
156.27185
200.77030
312.16415
387.79495
466.95289
544.35733
621.76177
700.91971
776.55051
887.94437
932.44281
1043.86068
1088.71467
1200.00000

Exotic Atoms (Album)

January 10th, 2012
 


What an Exotic Atom is

01 Hyperon
02 Muon Catalyzed Fusion
03 Diproton Helium
04 Onium
05 Neutronium
06 Mumesic Atom
07 Antiprotonic Helium
08 Mesonic Atom
09 Muonium
10 Positronium Hydride
11 Pionium
12 Quarkonium
13 Kaonic Hydrogen

Download the entire album

A link to a full length video I made for the album

DIY Temporary Cable Tie Guitar Frets version 2

January 8th, 2012
 

audio of the last bit

Here are a series of video clips using the guitar I posted the picture of earlier. Yeah it kind sounds like straight blues – but you can clearly see the xen-ness in the different between the cable tie positions and the back-filled fret slots (kerfs). This is not supposed to be mind blowing or anything – just showing that it sounds pretty good for a $40 guitar (or was it $30?) and a couple bucks worth of cable ties. Download the full quality video here.

Credit goes to Mo refined the cable tie idea even further. “Notes: To get the zip ties to sit flat, I used needle-nose pliers to pinch the part on the right edge of the neck to create a sharper angle; then I braced the locking edge and pulled the end tight with the needle-nose pliers. After further experimentation, I decided to alter the zip ties to make the part that sits on the neck thinner — that way there was much less “fret” buzz. I simply took a solid pair of scissors and trimmed up the middle of the ties before tying them. (I kept the outer end as wide as I could, so the locking mechanism would still work, then cut much narrower when I reached the part that sits over the neck.)”

He has some music with his cable ties available here: http://www.staplethistoyourforehead.com/search/label/Bohlen-Pierce

His main article (caution there is 30 second wait) : http://www.isaw.co.uk/close-up-of-temporary-frets.html

My articles are
http://chrisvaisvil.com/?p=779 http://chrisvaisvil.com/?p=871 http://chrisvaisvil.com/?p=878 http://chrisvaisvil.com/?p=939

91 notes of half of a tonality diamond

January 7th, 2012
 

91 notes audio only

I made a tonality diamond with primes up to 31 and cut out all of the results less than 1/1 and improvised using pianoteq with 88 of the remaining 91 notes.

Scala, midi, mp3, full quality video can be found here: http://micro.soonlabel.com/91-half-diamond/

Radio 1

January 6th, 2012
 

Radio 1 is an aleatoric composition.

It was generated through the Cakeawalk Pro Audio “extract rhythm” function performed on radio static that had been noise reduced numerous ways with various settings, which generated a rhythm in on a single note in a midi track. This was done many times and the result transposed and combined to give several “melodies” on a few midi tracks. Next I used these tracks to drive my synthesizer after programming various timbres and such, recording the sound on a corresponding audio track, which was then panned as I wished. The noise reduced version of the source is included in various places. Towards the end you get to hear the source material used to generate the “music”.

Contributors:
A cheap radio and an external LPT connected sound card to my 486SX laptop. The terrible reception inside the Amoco Research Center. Casio CZ-101 which is actually quite a good synthesizer – now taken apart for parts by a gentleman in the Boston area to whom I sold it after it died.

Inspiration:
All of the aleatoric composers before me such as David Cope with whom I had a exchanged a few emails about his work at the time and this composition. We met when I was searching for information on aleatoric composition. Here is an interesting article about David. http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/