When I promised (both myself and you, the reader) that this would be a low-frequency newsletter, I imagined a monthly email as the maximum, and thought a quarterly missive would be far more realistic. But here I am less than two weeks later, with the unfortunate news that the Saturday, March 14th show with Tanngrisnir and Vaster Than Empires at Pageant:Soloveev in Philadelphia is postponed. My apologies for the inconvenience - hopefully we can work out a new performance date before too long, and if the current pace of this newsletter feels like oversharing, it will surely slow down over time.
In the meantime, if you’d like a Tanngrisnir fix, may I recommend Upstream, our record from 2018? Vaster Than Empires’ eponymous cassette is also well worth your attention.
At the workbench
I’m still hard at work on the software instrument I described the last time I wrote. The control scheme for the audio portion feels like it is settling into place, and I’ve built a number of different synthesizers, sample playback engines, and effects processors that can plug into the basic framework that generates rhythm, pitch, and other audio parameters. (If you are curious to hear some of the current sound palette, here’s a quick subtractive synthesis example to check out).
Just about everything the instrument does (rhythm, pitch, sound, etc.), it does in generative and probabilistic ways. Outside of volume, tempo, and the basic configuration of sound generators / processors, most controls are defined using strategies such as “turn this knob to increase the percentage likelihood that this effect processor turns on with each new rhythmic event” or “turn this knob to widen the available range of pitches for random selection.” This creates a situation where the performer can move between focused and diffuse behavior - the knob travels from “this never happens” through “this happens sometimes” to “this always happens” in a way that feels satisfying and musical. And as someone with a long-standing interest in instruments which are at least partially resistant to control (looking at you, David Tudor), I enjoy the rather slippery behavior this engenders.
There’s still so much more to do - widening the sonic vocabulary, writing text, developing animation, and more. But I’m enjoying pushing it forward, and grateful for the momentum.
Nonce
Courtesy of your intrepid cartoonist John Granzow:
I would totally wear those boots.
Thanks for reading, and best wishes,
Christopher
Christopher Burns
http://sfsound.org/~cburns/