Today’s rumination:
I’m sitting here staring at my modular synth. It’s embarrassingly large and feature-laden. That’s one of the benefits of being retired and having no family to support. But what does one do with this magnificent instrument?
Making amazing sounds is a stroll in the park. A slam-dunk. Easier than falling off a log. There are literally millions of possibilities. Turn a knob, get a great new sound. But after an hour or two, this activity begins to seem a bit undirected. A bit pointless. One begins to think to oneself, “How exactly might I assemble some of these amazing sounds into a coherent whole — into a piece of actual music?”
That’s not easy at all. I frankly have no answers that even remotely satisfy me. It’s option paralysis with a vengeance.
In the bad old days, when I owned a 4-panel Serge Modular and an 8-track TASCAM reel-to-reel, the problem was utterly intractable. A segment of sound, once recorded, could not be moved around, other than by bouncing it over to a separate tape deck and then bouncing it back, a process that was extremely finicky and degraded the sound quality. If, on listening to the playback, you decided that one sound started half a second too late with respect to another sound, you were basically screwed.
I wish I still owned the Serge, but I don’t regret giving up the 8-track reel-to-reel. Tape is a technology we can all live happily without.
Today, editing is much, much easier. In a multitrack computer audio platform, sound clips can be moved backward and forward in time with complete freedom. They can be shortened, sliced apart, and repeated with abandon. The tempo within a given clip can, within limits, be sped up or slowed down. Conceiving of the arrangement of sounds — having a coherent idea for the composition — that’s the problem. Which of the millions of possible sounds should one employ, and how exactly should they be deployed with respect to other sounds?
In a forlorn attempt to narrow down the options, I decided to do something in D minor at 108 bpm. That limitation doesn’t turn out to be helpful. I now have over a gigabyte of audio clips, and no clue what to do with them.
Composing with notes and chords is a whole lot easier, for a variety of reasons. My unconscious intuition has a much better ability to handle notes and chords, due both to long familiarity and to the fact that notes and chords have a built-in syntax. It’s multi-dimensional, but it’s a syntax. I doubt I’ll live long enough for my intuition to become facile at arranging modular synthesizer audio segments, and I’m pretty darn sure that there is nobody in the whole wide world who has a clue about how to even begin developing a coherent syntax with which to make coherent statements using these materials. “Put a high, clicky sound above a low, moody sound and then interrupt it all with a noise burst” is not syntax, because it’s arbitrary. I could have said anything, just then. You wouldn’t have known the difference. Whereas if I say, “Play an F# over the C major triad,” you’ll know (at least if you know any theory at all) that I’m describing a dissonance, and that the F# will quite likely be a moving tone (depending on the surrounding harmonic context, of course, because that will affect the syntactical meaning of the F#, but in knowable and time-honored ways).
Also, if you’re composing with notes and chords and MIDI, you can edit a single note: Change that F# into an F-natural. With an audio clip that contains, let’s say, an entire pattern of running 16th-notes — well, you can change a single note there too, using pitch correction software, but that doesn’t actually allow you to forge a path through the billions of possibilities and arrive at a coherent result. On the contrary: We’ve just multiplied the number of possibilities by another factor of a thousand or two.
A line from an old Firesign Theatre comedy routine comes to mind: “I think I’ll go live in a tree and learn to play the flute.”
oscillations & tunemania 