Category Archives: Shorts

A series of short pieces, all around 1 minute long. Rather than fight my short attention span, I am embracing it.

Shorts #44: November 2024

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November 2024

This piece titled by Sonia Elks. Artistic feedback from Paula Gazzard.

There’s a principle in psychoacoustics called “stream segregation”. When you listen to somebody playing a lot of notes on the piano, but there’s a clear melody, this is because your brain groups some of the notes together. It “segregates” “streams” of notes by pitch. However, there are only so many streams you can recognise at a time. If you have more than that, the phenomenon is called “wall of noise.” In that case, your brain doesn’t know where the melody is. A constantly changing texture has some voices seem to come to the front and then retreat. No two people hear a wall of noise in the same way.

This piece has 47 different voices of sinusoidal grains. Each voice varies it’s pitch and panning position very slightly with every note. Each note is extremely short, although they do gradually double in average duration and then return to their original lengths. The longer pitches become “glissons”, which is a short sine wave that moves from one pitch to another instead of staying steady. The very end overlaps the 47 granular voices with 47 glissandos.

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A Slippery Place

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This piece was written for Lev Taylor.

When trying to pick a religious name, I raised the idea of “Glitch” with my rabbi, who was initially nonplussed. In Yiddish, it means a mistake or a slip up. It’s in English that it’s come to mean a voltage spike and to go on to name a genre of digital art.

I made this piece out of a photo of Rabbi Lev Taylor, which I found on the internet. I used a script to glitch hundreds of copies of the Jpeg and stitch them into a film. I also played the Jpeg as it it were an audio file. Then I converted it to a larger file format and stretched it with PaulStretch. I used SuperCollider’s PV_RandComb ugen to pick a few frequencies to play at a time. Due to the maths of the FFT, this tends toward high pitches. I stitched everything together and sent him this piece.

Honestly, I like the idea of going by Glitch so much, I’m thinking about what contexts I could use it in. Art, sure! Everyday life?

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Shorts #42: Lacewing

Lacewing

This piece was commissioned and titled by Tim Walters.

This piece has two instruments – one uses the Ringz Ugen in SuperCollider and the other is a Sine wave which is phase modulated by another sine wave where both are tuned to the same frequency. It is in harmonic minor, tuned with the default just tuning.

Harmonic minor is known as “Mogen Ovos” to klezmer musicians. Rather than apply western harmony practice (except for the final cadence), every player is picking notes independently. The just tuning helps hold the notes in a key centre.

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Shorts #41: Catalyst

Shorts #41: Catalyst. Commissioned and titled by Andy Bannister

This piece was commissioned and titled by Andy Bannister.

Explaining why he picked this title, he said, “My thought process for this, is that the first half sounds like a catalyst for a reaction towards the latter half which could also be interpreted the sound of a substance or object changing state, like liquid to gas etc.”

The time elapsed between the original commission and this post is a lot longer than usual and I can’t remember how the piece was made, but according to my filing system, it was made using chaos synthesis on a Eurorack. This is a type of frequency modulation where oscillator A modulates oscillator B, which modulates oscillator C which modulates oscillator A. This is an exciting system because the feedback makes it chaotic.

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Glass

Glass – for Irene’s birthday

This piece was composed using SuperCollider and a synthesiser for Irene’s birthday. It was presented as a part of an installation at the Rupture Gaming Festival in Kent.

The source material is recorded with an analogue modular synthesiser. The SuperCollider program takes that material and granulates it, dramatically changing the playback speed.

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Shorts #39: Something Happy

[play]Shorts #39: Something Happy (2016)

Commissioned and titled by sevenhelz in honour of Deathboy.

This piece is influenced by the Vaporwave genre and movement and was written in SuperCollider. The melody is based on a markov chain of common melodic gestures. The instrument is based on the ‘Epic Sax’ code by Rukano. The bassline is adapted from the help file on Patterns. The plucking instrument’s durations is quarter divisions of random durations used by the melody, which is what gives it it’s slightly odd character.

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Shorts #38: distant scritches

[play]Shorts #38: distant scritches (2016)

Commissioned and titled by sevenhelz in honour of Deathboy.

This piece was written in SuperCollider. All of the sounds are generated using the Gendyn4 UGen, which is based on descriptions of stochastic synthesis published by Iannis Xenakis in Formalised Music. This means that the timbre is generated by probabilities. The ‘pitches’ and sound controls are also controlled by random numbers, repeated in a structured pattern.

The sounds change to become more resonant over the course of the piece. The addition of reverb is what primarily gives the piece its character.

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Dick Pic Hymnen

[play] Dick Pic Hymnen (2016)

This piece was commissioned by lesbiancockslut.com [NSFW]

When commissioned, I appealed on twitter for people to send me dick pics. Specifically, encrypted dick picks, to highlight that various national governments are spying on our sexts. In return, I was sent two unecrpyted images and one encrypted one. The unlocked images were of a tin of spotted dick, and a rooster (known to the English as a ‘cock’). The encrypted image was of the sender’s ‘friend, Richard.’

I took these files and played them as if they were wav files. Compressed and encrypted files sound like white noise, so I took the two unencrypted images and converted them to raw image formats. I then converted those to raw audio and used them as samples.

The pitches and rhythms in the piece are taken from a hymn that was popular in American Catholic churches when I was a child.

The images in the video are (obviously) not the images in the audio, as those were of unknown copyright status. The video images come from picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/hJOtwAhiy6I9de3uFZxJUw and ommons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boxerbriefs.jpg

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CCR76 (1969 / 2015)

[play]Shorts #36: CCR76 (1969 / 2015)

A realisation of Nature Study Notes CCR76 by Cornelius Cardew, commissioned by Stefan Szczelkun.

Nature Study Notes is a collection of 152 different rites, or short text ‘scores’, used by the Scratch Orchestra as a spring board for improvisation. CCR76’s text says, ‘It’s not music. It’s my heart beating.’

For this, piece, I started with the most obvious cue. I downloaded a sample of a heartbeat from Freesound and recorded my coffee grinder, which I felt alluded to a rapid heart rate. Both of these sounds appear with no modification, but the heartbeat sound is also used for amplitude modulation and ring modulation of a FM sweep I coded in SuperCollider. The piece was assembled in Ardour.

This piece was used in the Scratch Orchestra Nature Study Notes performance at Cafe Oto in London on 22 February, 2015. As Stefan only had one speaker, the piece is in mono.

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Shorts #35: Radioactive Wellness (2014)

[play]Shorts #35: Radioactive Wellness (2014)

Commissioned and titled by Chrissie Caulfield.

Chrissie asked me to write something with a radiation theme for her friend, who is having radiotherapy for cancer. I looked into getting a geiger counter, and even found who might lend me one, when I realised I would need a radioactive element in my studio. Also, as I was thinking of what to do with the clicks, I realised I wanted to use them for triggers, so I would need a geiger counter with a line out and everything seemed to be getting overly complex. In the end, I realised chaotic or stochastic noise would sound the same as the effect I wanted, which much less of a chance of accidentally gaining super powers (that’s what happens when you mishandle a radioactive element in your studio / workshop, right?).

In the end, I made this with my MOTM modular synthesiser. The final recipient was reportedly very happy with it.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)