Dave Seidel: Recent Episodes
Dave Seidel
Experimental electronic music, mostly in the drone category. This is where I put live sets, one-offs, experiments, and excerpts from longer releases.
CD: "~60 Hz" on Irritable Hedgehog - http://recordings.irritablehedgehog.com/album/dave-seidel-60-hz
All releases, including netlabel items: http://mysterybear.net/music
https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/
Sorry, SC won't let me follow any more people, so don't feel slighted if I don't follow you back.
Nothing profound, just a quickie, inspired by my acquisition of the very cool Cascading Register from omiindustries (https://www.omiindustriies.com/cascading-register). That is what is generating the pitches in this generative piece. I used a scale I devised made from two six-note hexanies a whole tone apart (so twelve notes altogether.)
For the gearheads, here follows a summary of most of the stuff that I used.
Pitch generation: Cascading Register, clocked by Wogglebug, output quantized by uTune and VC Octave Switch.
Main two voices: Tiptop Buchla 258t -> Optomix -> Nutone -> Prism Addition voice: Loquelic Iteritas -> Electus Versio
Not going to enumerate the modulation sources, of which there were several.
Recorded in Reaper with the following plugins: ReaEQ, Gong Amp, Blackhole.
See https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0508-germane-shepard/48968
Image:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Globular_Cluster_M10.jpg
A bit over three hours of slowly shifting chords, modulating between sonorities, part 1 of 6. This was originally conceived as a single VERY long track, but that proved to be impractical given Bandcamp's limits on file size. Perhaps it's better this way. I hope this music can provide some measure of peace and serenity in the midst of this long period of isolation, worry, and tragedy.
Download the entire piece (free) at https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/the-ophanim-cycles
An early prototype of this piece: https://soundcloud.com/mysterybear/ophanim
Another way of seeing/hearing the underlying chord sequence used in this piece: https://soundcloud.com/mysterybear/hexany-cycle
I've recently discovered (at long last) the music of Danish composer Per Nørgård. He developed a compositional techniques based on what he called the "infinity series", which is a simple formula for developing a series of numbers based on an interval such as a minor second. The series takes the initial interval and then slowly expands upon it both upwards and downwards in pitch, getting broader in scope as it progresses. This idea can be used to generate melodies, rhythms, or other aspect of a composition.
I decided to try playing around with this, but applying it to microtonal intervals, using Csound and a Python script to generate the Csound score according to the series. I ended up with this brief study, which takes the first 256 terms of the series and applies it to three of my favorite intervals simultaneously: - 9/8 (major whole tone from the 9th harmonic) - 11/8 (unidecimal tritone,from the 11th harmonic) - 7/4 (septimal minor seventh, from the 7th harmonic)
The starting tone (240 Hz) plays throughout the piece as the other notes unfold above and below it. I used sine waves processed with a touch of tanh distortion to add a slight amount of harmonic content.
Csound and Python source code: https://github.com/DaveSeidel/music-src/tree/master/infinity-study
References: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_N%C3%B8rg%C3%A5rd - https://web.archive.org/web/20071010091253/http://www.pernoergaard.dk/eng/strukturer/uendelig/uindhold.html
or, "Thirty Way of looking at an Eikosany" (apologies to Wallace Stevens)
A sequence of 30 unique but related six-note chords in a microtonal tuning. Each of the six notes is doubled with octave displacements, so there are actually twelve tones in each chord.
For tuning geeks: these chords comprise the complete set of hexanies contained within a 1-3-5-7-11-13 eikosany, ordered such that each chord has at least one tone in common with the next chord in sequence.
Made in Csound using artisanal sine waves.
A study in abstract microtonal sonorities. Please listen on headphones or good speakers. As Eleh says, volume reveals detail.
Dedicated to Kraig Grady.
Harmonics: modulation between four six-note hexanies with common tones, all derived from the same twenty-note eikosany.
Sonics: modular synth, delay and looping pedals, reverb.
Ophanim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophanim
Image: detail from Jakob Böhme's "Theosophia revelata" (1730), found at https://speciesbarocus.tumblr.com/post/17943811038/jakob-b%C3%B6hme-theosophia-revelata-1730-detail (complete work at https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24514421M/Theosophia_revelata_das_ist_Alle_g%c3%b6ttliche_Schriften).
A quick one, the work of a Sunday afternoon, using my experimental system, which is built around the Make Noise Morphagene and has no oscillators or filters. All the sounds here originate as recordings of individual IPA phonemes, granulated and stretched by the Morphagene and further messed up in various ways by other modules. The output of the modular system goes through a looping Strymon El Capistan and then a Bastl Thyme.
I've been following J. Soliday's recent work with speech synthesis, and while I had already been fooling around for a little while with these phoneme recordings, I thought it was cool that we are both looking at speech, though in very different ways.
Here's a diagram of the system I used here: https://www.modulargrid.net/e/racks/view/1107419
Live performance by David D. McIntire (baritone saxophone, bass clarinet), Michael Miller (bass clarinet, zwoom) and Dave Seidel (electronics) at Missouri Western State University, March 4, 2020.
This performance is a collaboration created by McIntire and Miller improvising with my piece Involution 2 (with some live tweaking of the electronics). This was our first performance as an ensemble, and we had no rehearsals. We had a great time, and I hope that we (or some other assemblage) can do this again sometime, hence the designation as "#1".
Involution symbol found at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cowie%27s_Printer%27s_Pocket-Book_and_Manual/Mathematical,_Algebraical,_and_Geometrical_Characters
An augmented sonification of Kyle Gann's Anatomy of an Octave (the extant condensed version with 580 pitches) in the form of a catalog piece. All 580 ratios are played against a 240Hz base pitch, one at a time from low to high with a duration of 7 seconds each, with additional chord tones derived from the frequencies (combination tones, Pythagorean means, etc.) using my Implication Organ instrument in Csound. I recommend downloading before listening to get the highest quality sound.
This piece is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=697lo5twu5A
Thanks to Kyle for his work, and for giving me the go-ahead to publish this piece and approving the title.
For more information about the list of ratios, see Kyle's excellent book The Arithmetic of Listening (https://www.amazon.com/Arithmetic-Listening-History-Impractical-Musician/dp/0252084411). Also, listen to his music!
More on the Implication Organ: https://github.com/DaveSeidel/music-src/tree/master/implication-organ
I had intended to publish this on Bandcamp, but the file exceeds their upload limits. But you can consider supporting me by buying one of my other releases at https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/
Image: The Dove, No. 14 by Hilma af Klint, retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:5_hilma_af_klint,_the_dove_no_14,_1915.jpg
A piece for the Implication Organ, using the non-octave Bohlen A12 scale. Recorded as a single performance on 21 October 2018. In retrospect, my primary inspirations here were probably Catherine Christer Hennix and Boris.
Download and/or purchase at https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/alkahest
The Implication Organ is a drone-oriented microtonal electronic system, an organ that can play no more than two notes at once. Whenever two notes are played together, the IO generates chords based on the frequency ratio of these notes: combination (sum, difference, and product) tones, and intervals corresponding to Pythagorean and golden means. All sounds are produced by a Raspberry Pi 3 with Pisound running Csound, processed through a tabletop full of various analog and digital devices,including (in this particular incarnation): Pladask Elektrisk Matrise, 4MS/Repeater Noise Swash, DigiTech FreqOut, Zvex Fat Fuzz Factory, Red Panda Particle, Moog Cluster Flux, Earthquaker Avalanche Run, Strymon El Capistan, Pigtronix Infinity Looper, Boomerang III, Red Panda Context, and Ekdahl Moisturizer. It is played using a QuNexus keyboard and controlled by a Lemur OSC touch interface running on a Samsung tablet.
The Bohlen A12 scale is described at www.huygens-fokker.org/bpsite/otherscales.html.
Image of golden ouroborous from a monument in Wallonia. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mausol%C3%A9e_Goblet_d%27Alviella_-_Signes_26.JPG
My set from the first night of Providence Y2K International Live Looping Festival (see http://www.pvdloop.org), at the AS220 main space, September 30, 2016. Live recording, includes a few sounds made by people in the vicinity of the recording device.
I was playing electric bass with vibrator, socket wrench slide, and transducer. Setup included Zvex Fat Fuzz Factory, volume pedal, Moogerfooger ClusterFlux, E-H Deluxe Memory Man, Boomerang III, 4ms Stereo Panneur.
Most of this piece was derived from the first four notes of Angelo Badalamenti's Love Theme from "Twin Peaks".
Buddha Machine 3 (Chang Fang 禅房) with two drones and additional processing. Played and recorded in real time.
Sound sources: - melody: Buddha Machine 3 (Chang Fang 禅房) - high drone: Nebulophone through DEP-2b - low drone: Chaos NAND Synth though Nose Swash
Processing loop: Ring Modulator, MuRF, ClusterFlux, Deluxe Memory Man with Hazarai, Boomerang III, Ekdahl Moisturizer.
Recorded direct from mixer to Zoom H6. Normalized and EQ'd in Audacity, no edits.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reclining_Buddha_at_cave_no._26.jpg
Disquiet Junto Project 0226: Bucky Ball Compose music for a fictional greatest-hits collection of the electronic music of R. Buckminster Fuller.
More on the project here: http://disquiet.com/0226/
I was inspired by Tom Johnson's piece The Chord Catalogue (which consists of all possible chords in a single octave, played on a keyboard). This is a similar concept, but applied to a six-note 1-3-5-7 hexany scale in just intonation and using only the three-note chords. My reasoning was that, had Bucky been a composer, his mathematical and geometrical inclinations might have led him down a similar path. (Maybe he would have been more of a modernist than a minimalist, given his era, but he did overlap with minimalism.)
Coded and rendered it in Csound, no post-processing.
Image credit: The original uploader was Cyp at English Wikipedia. Later versions were uploaded by Fropuff at en.wikipedia. (Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons. Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AOctahedron.jpg
This is the second track of the release "Prism, Mirror, Lens". For more information and downloads, please visit https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/prism-mirror-lens
The x-ray crystallography image that accompanies this release was created by Dr. Thomas White / Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY and is used by kind permission.
Single-take improv using Nebulophone, Freq Box, Ring Modulator, Cluster Flux, DEP-2b, Deluxe Memory Man w/ Hazarai, Stereo Panneur, Boomerang III. Recorded direct from mixer to Zoom H5. Normalized and converted to MP3 in Audacity. No other post-processing, no edits.
Image credit: By NASA, NOAO, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHorsehead-Hubble.jpg
Part 1 of a two part generative piece written in Csound.
For more information, and to download the entire album, please visit https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/imaginary-harmony.
My entry for Disquiet Junto 178. In this project, we were presented with a field recording of bells in Berlin, and directed to "[r]ework the source audio in a manner that reinforces the melodic component of the bells. Beyond that sole instruction, the choices are up to you."
Process: 1. take a 56-second excerpt from the source file (156s - 212s) 2. apply fade-in and fade out 3. stretch the track to four times its original length (using the Paulstretch effect in Audacity) 4. using Csound, convolve the track against an impulse response file made in an empty nuclear reactor hall (see below for details) 5. repeat step 4 four more times (five times in all) 6 convert to FLAC, add tags, upload
No additional sounds were added.
The impulse response I used is from the CC-licensed Open Acoustic Impulse Response (Open AIR) Library, specifically the "R1 Nuclear Reactor Hall" IR, made in empty hall of the first nuclear reactor in Stockholm. Link: http://www.openairlib.net/auralizationdb/content/r1-nuclear-reactor-hall
More on this 178th Disquiet Junto project — “Emphasize the bells in an urban field recording” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/05/28/disquiet0178-sepulchrabells/
Source audio by Michael Raphael, aka Sepulchra, who runs the sound-library firm at rabbitearsaudio.com. Audio used with Raphael’s permission. Track originally posted at:
https://soundcloud.com/sepulchra/150526-marienkirche
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
This is an excerpt from an arbitrarily-long generative piece composed for an upcoming production of Samuel Beckett's "Play". Written in Csound, made out of sine waves (three groups of three).
Update: There is a very nice write-up on this piece by Marc Weidenbaum at http://disquiet.com/2015/05/17/sine-waves-for-samuel-beckett/.
Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:12crossings-rose-rhodonea-limacon-symmetrical-knot.svg (Public Domain).