Week 13 & 14 final piece and reflection

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/celestial-mechanics-no-1-sol-mix-1-final

It’s been quite the journey from SOL’s humble beginning in making a binaural beat out of the #741 solfeggio frequency to a 14 minute composition with understated drones exploding into a chaotic expression of the overwhelming energy of creation, to indie rock pop refrains, drawn out dramatic strings and arpeggiated psychedelic harp melodies. At moments it felt like it was two big for me. I have never made a work like this. Generally, I see my art making as an explosion of brute force. It’s violent, dark and usually a reaction to the unjust and cruel realities of the post-modern age and our fundamental disrespect for nature and ourselves. Art making was the outlet and catharsis to the turbulence I experience in my life.  After the experience of Ananda this all changed for me and I felt compelled to create expressing the wonder and sublime I see does exist in nature and is reflected in the cosmos. There was something quite earnest about this undertaking that was in stark contrast to much of the cynical and detached work that typifies a lot of postmodern art making. It’s like we have lost all sense of imagination and wonder and are lost in mechanized hell of sarcastic readings of art.  In rejecting Aesthetics we have become wholly beholden to them everything is know reflected through the lens of the other our feelings and thoughts are irrelevant, everything is compared and contrasted and nothing is new. I felt that by in essence making such a vulnerable work about spiritualism I essentially left my self-wide open for attack. I am highly aware that most of the concepts I am talking about most people believe are ‘new age nonsense’.  Indeed, part of the nature of delving into the inner world is that it is completely subjective and unable to be rationalized which is anathema to the dominant scientific rationalist approach. I had hoped that at least it would touch people in some way but I’m not sure that I was wholly successful in that judging by the response in my presentations. I will say it touched me and the essence of my spirit confronted my history and purged some deep pain I had been holding onto which ultimately was my intention with the work as a vehicle towards wholeness. Upon re-listening, I had a realization that perhaps, I still need to refine parts of the melodic aspects of the work.  There are moments where the piece is slightly out of time, which works in parts but could use some tightening up. The influence of free jazz is noticeable and in a sense through the course of the making I was essentially improvising with myself. I do definitely want to refine the mix and re-record some of the guitar parts in the second section unfortunately I feel that time as always got the better of me in the end managing so much material. Ideally I would like to get the guitar to sing in that way that Butch Vig Sonic Youth mix does. So after a short break to regroup it’s back to the studio for me. I will say that I did consistently work on this and stretched myself beyond what I’m used to and into new territory and that I am completely happy with the first section of the work that represents the formless void and big-bang. I am also wondering whether for meditation and diffusion purposes it might be worth trying to make a version of the piece where the melody is more textural so that you can float along it like a cosmic ocean for use in the solar room I intend to make in 2nd semester.  While the more guitar pieces really work in the song form I’m not sure if they will work in the installation setting but on the other hand maybe its time to bring rock and music back into the art world. I don’t really understand divisions I love it all. Art is Art no matter if made with a guitar or a cardboard box. In the end I felt I made a piece that did echo the fragility and radiance of the sun the shining light that gives life to this world and managed to explore a softer part of myself and in that sense I would call it a success.

Week 12 Process Journal

The final week of making involved me mainly working on the melodic aspects of my composition  including re-amping some more of my midi parts . Creating a 90′s indie rock-esque pop section for the middle section of my composition and as per Alex’s suggestion in last weeks crit section recording some acoustic guitar part for my composition. The recording of the acoustic guitar parts proved immensely challenging. Not having  adequate amount of time to experiment with my microphone placement the guitar I borroweds age and need of new strings meant that the recordings sound dull but yet harsh and abrasive at the same time. I tried my best to fix this in this in the mix as I like the parts and the idea but over the break it is my intention to rerecord some of these parts and attend to the harsh present quality of the middle section of the mix.

The middle section leans back to my 90′s indie rock roots of seeing bands like magic dirt and sonic youth and how the beautiful quality of their guitar melodies brought this sense of rapture and unbridled enthusiasm that I asscoiate with the warm bright glow of the sun and I tried to bring into the work. it amazes me how just three notes can create such a range of music and be so exciting and uplifting it reminds me that their is so much to be gleaned from simplicity, I know that I have a tendency to overdo things and this was a subtle reminder that somtimes simple is best. Their is a reason why the 1-4-5- combination is the basis of most modern pop music and speaks to so many people.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-middle-section

Sonic Youth The Diamond sea

https://youtu.be/7kmTXu-peg8

I really love string sections , they colour and emote like no other instruments in the orchestra. Synthesized strings often sound horrible and  fake but i don’t mind them in this context as they give it an etheral otherwordly context and feel cloudy. I reamped the string recordings through my ocd pedal and the distortion added subtle mist to this part of the track. For the final section of the work I really wanted a sense of melocholia.  Once the work of creation is finished what do we do with that precious gift called life. Unfortunately when it comes to the history of Humankind mostly what we have done with that gift is debase it. I still have hope for humankind though and that’s part of what creating this work was about. I hope that one day we can awaken to our inner solar consciousness as a species and be kinder to each other and the environment, live in harmony with creation and all it’s creatures in a new dawn of humankind

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/string-organ-melody

I decided to add a drum section to the part that signifies the moment of the big bang based on the correspondence of drums with the idea of a bang . the creator banged on the drum and the universe was born. the idea came partially from a dream I had about all the dead members of my family. My grandfather who was a tap dancer told me that I had to continue the family legacy tell the story of the history of the beat. perhaps this is what he meant and its funny how this and the crystal that was owned by my dad link back to The Sun as being representative of the energy of the father.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-drums

Solar Cards  and Andre Breton’s Wall

During the last week of working on my project I unpacked a random box and found a card of the sun citing inside. i took it with me to the studio and looked at it while i worked on my project to center myself in ideas around the sun this gave me the idea to bring an assortment of objects that I had in my home to frame the presentation of my piece and focus peoples attention on the fact that  it was a musical representation of the sun and to intimate my larger plan to create a room of solar representations and accumulations. One of my inspirations for  creating this room was the accumulation of objects by Andre Breton leader of the Surrealist movement. I’m interested in exploring on how placing a set of objects in a space together exploits their symbolic connection to one another, in this case objects representing the sun. i plan to make some drawing and video works about the sun and include them in the accumulation of objects in the solar room.

Surrealist Andre Bretons collection in the Pompidou Centre Paris including artworks by Picasso and Joan Miro and indigenous artifacts an accumulation of oddities from Breton’s home.

The Sun in a Kabbalistic Tarot set showing the symbol for the sun and its path on the tree of life between the the moon and mercury.

The Sun In The Golden Dawn Tarot Set Showing two young women dancing in the the glow of illumination.

The Mayan Sun God Kinich Ahua who is described in the following manner-

The figure of KINICH AHAU is ONE and TRINE at the same time, it corresponds to:

1. A HIGH PRIEST. Who lived in the Sacred Mayan Lands and had his spiritual headquarters in the Holy City of UXMAL, and his rettreat in the Pyramid of Ak-he-nah-tun. He took his people to the Ascension. 2. THE SPIRIT OF THE SUN. It represents the Divine Essence of the Sun of our system, the "Giver of Life" for our world. And his divine emanation is the subtle energy of our spirit. 3. THE SOLAR SPIRIT OF THE GALAXY. He is the powerful spiritual presence that emanates from the Center of the Galaxy. The extraordinary Spirit of the Galaxy. source

http://en.kinich-ahau.org/kinich.html

Here Ahau as the number 20 Glyph in the Tzolkin Calendar acts as ab embodiment of Solar Consciousness. A book by Jose Arguelles called the Mayan Factor explores the spiritual significance of the Mayan Calender these cards were adapted from the ideas in the book as archetypes to meditate on.

Process Journal Week 11

This week I mainly focused on finalizing the ‘chaotic’ first part of my work by re-amping most of my midi material through my Fender Bassman Guitar Amp and several guitar pedals. Unfortunately i discovered my current audio interface does not have multiple outputs which meant I created a lot of horrible feedback loops. As I was only sending a mono signal out of the interface in order to monitor what i was recording through a new channel I set the output of that track on the other output from the one i was sending out of. My next gear purchase will be a new interface with multiple outs as my work around is not an effective long term solution.

Here is the feedback drone of my original piece and for comparison one of the files I re-amped through the bassman and my OCD distortion pedal. when mixed together in the main mix along with volume automation, compression and delays they had the effect of much denser mix that now seemed to reach out into the sound field its as if we were finally moving through the universe rather than watching from a distance. The distortion on the track made the have a sense vibration that lacked in the original recording.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/feedback-drone-ocd

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/feedback-drone-original

Here is the same recording again re-amped through my Earthquaker devices Tremolo and MXR phaser pedals. I find it weird that in my head phase effects are immediately associated with space. The effect is almost synonymous with the science fiction movie genre and i was really surprised when I first heard audio of the solar wind and the magnetic field of the earth that they actually sound like phase effects. I used this re-amping in the build of momentum in my sound work that represents the climatic ramp of energy that lead to the explosion of force that exploded the universe out of the singularity

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/feedback-drone-tremolo

Here is the first part of my work leading into the emergence of life and melody presented in my fina presentation in week eleven it has become a lot more bombastic starting quitely but shidting across the sound field through use of panning and out of the speakers through volume control and the new re-amped tracks in my mix. I really made an effort to spend some time attending to the finer points of the mix as I’m starting to realize the key to a good sounding mix is it’s fluidity in moving through the sound field it cant stay in the one place or it becomes lifeless and dull.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-act-1-bounce

Here are some photographs of my re-amping setup.

I want to explore the possibility of doing a live diffusion performance of the SOL composition inside the solar room. As the room will only be small I would most likely use a set of 6 speakers. I decided to investigate spatialized works of celestial and immediately the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen came to mind as I had read somewhere that he believed he was from the star system of Sirius. I came across this composition called cosmic pulses it seems pretty obvious that the stereo mix of this piece does not so it justice. Conceived for 8 channels it used over 241 trajectories through the space and I imagine a rush of cosmic energy passing rushing past you in space. The speed at which this piece moves I could imagine feeling seasick from the rapid movements. The piece is a highly systematized rendering of solar ideas it has 24 layers of synthesized sounds to represent each hour in the day. The sounds layers begin from lowest and slowest to highest and fastest dropping out  individually once all 24 layers have accumulated. Each had a pitch and speed assigned to it from 1-24. i find it interesting how Stockhausen has used numerical values as the basis of this work. I can see a similar methodology at play in some of the systems I used based on the number six ( because of it’s solar associations ) in any modulating parameters in my work I tried where I could to use a 6 base id it sounded right. i have to say their is something I find wholly compelling but utterly confounding about Stockhausen’s work its almost as if its literally flying over my head. His understand of sound in space is like nothing I’ve ever heard before

http://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/cosmic-pulses.html

Stockhausen - Cosmic Pulses gif

WEEK 10 PROCESS JOURNAL

After the problems I had with trying to record audio in Logic and the limitations I find it has with mixing audio I decided to Bounce out all of my midi tracks out of Logic and into Protools for the final mixdown and composition. This was a long and tedious task As I essentially rebuild my entire mix from the ground up from all the various fragments of material I had amassed over the course of the last 10 weeks. By  adding in the guitar parts higher in the mix the life that was missing slowly started to emerge in the piece. At moments it would swell and other points it would ebb down into a quite drone. As now my midi files had been converted into audio tracks it was now possible to have full control over the automation parameters which made a difference

I began by bringing in the Solfeggio and sun recordings. I created an extra Solfeggio frequency track which I modulated by using volume modulation and a phaser plugin modulating at around 6hz.

A photo of the volume automation on the third solfeggio frequency

Here is the effect of the third solfeggio frequency beating against the  original binaural beat. While it sounds a little grating on its own i liked the way this effect in the main body of the mix drew a subtle attention to the frequency embedded in the base of the track and around which SOL is built

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/solfeggio-modulation-1

Here is my The begins of my rebuild of my final mix while still not reaching the fullness of sound and level of movement I was aiming to achieve in my final mix the building blocks are beginning to fall into a concrete place

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-hybrid-1

I started working on the entry of the melody in the work. I decided that i wanted the guitar parts and shift to the melodic elements to enter in a weak and almost naively innocent manner first of to represent the fragility of live itself and how it arrived in an almost unexpected way. When children are born and we begin our lives we are innocent and fragile. The first organisms on earth were tiny and single celled tiny creatures and from them the great complexity of life unfolded.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-child-emerging

Flower installation

Part of my long term envisioning of the sound work is that exist as part of a solar room an installation of solar based representations. The room would be filed with flowers that a typically though of as associated with the sun, Sunflowers, daffodils  and daisies with Iris to provide the balancing energy of purple to the predominance of yellow in the room as to much yellow can sometimes make people nervous and agitated as it can overstimulate the creative energies. I used flowers in a piece I now call renewel ,where they were part of a sound installation that i ceremoniously destroyed, as the sculpture broke ,the smell of the flowers lifted through the air creating a powerful aroma. Since making that work Ive wanted to create another work using flowers as the provide such a string tangible link to the world of nature and the magical world of the fairy or elemental being that is believed to reside withing the soul of the flower. A flower like the Sunflower immediately evokes images of the sun. When I buy flowers at home it automatically brings a calming energy. Flowers have been used throughout the ages to symbolize the different aspects of love and friendzhip.  The idea is to create a work that stimulates all of the senses and it is impossible to do that with just sound alone and the flowers will provide a link in the indoor man-made environment with the world of nature. As humans , inside in our cities we loose this sense of connection. Gardens have been a way humans to connect with the woods trees and flowers we left behind when we created the city.

My flower based ephemeral installation renewal 2016

Anna Schuliet - Bloom: Tiny Office with Tulips

Anna Schuliet Red Mums. from Bloom, 2003

Schuliet used over 28,000 flowers to accompany a sounwork in this site specific installation filling an abandoned mental institution giving it a new life as a world of fanatasy and imagination. Afterwards the flowers were given to patients at other psychiatric facilities.

Raf Simons Haute Couture collection for Dior in 2012 used thousands of installed flowers as part of the runway presentation. When I saw the Documentary Dior and I was instantly attracted to the idea of a room filled with thousands of flowers and how magical and evocative that idea could be. Flowers in a sense are the most sensuous and beauty creation of mother nature and have been inspiration to the artist since time began

“He began with a setting of fairy-tale beauty that evoked Christian Dior’s passion for flowers (he named that debut “New Look” collection for a flower’s corolla), calling on the Parisian florist Eric Chauvin to decorate a series of five rooms in a stately Parisian hôtel particulier until the walls were solid with blooms, one the intense blue of massed blue delphiniums, others of yellow laburnums, or pink-tinged white orchids, whilst the Christian Dior room was a ravishing symphony of pink and yellow rose, peony, and dahlia blossoms.”

http://www.vogue.com/fashion-week-review/862584/christian-dior-fall-2012-couture/

Process Journal Week 9

After receiving feedback from my presentation that the mix appeared to be flat I started think about ways i could inject some life into my mix I booked some time in the SSL room with the idea of bussing some of my midi tracks through the outboard compressors in the room and potentially recording some tracks on the grand piano. I haven’t used a large format  mixing console like the SSL in a number of years and have never used that desk before so it was a challenge even trying to get a mix up and working and I spent a lot of time patching and repatching cables . I really wanted to be able to mix the tracks on through the SSL i was able to get a fader mix up but i couldn’t work out how to get the mixing desk into the state where the faders on the consul would match the DAW. It would only work on the second half of the desk and not the tracks I wanted to send through the mixing desk. I was able to bus my celtic harp file through the Avalon pre-amp and compressors in the SSL room and it added a greater sense of warmth presence and dynamics to the synthetic sound of the software instrument. It was a big learning curve using that room but I pushed past my fear of ‘not good enough’ and decide that I should keep trying to use the desk its rare to have unimpeded access to that kind of equipment to experiment without paying. While I didn’t get a lot of useable material the experience was valuable in and of itself.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/celtic-harp-avalon

I recorded some piano , unfortunately the piano in the SSL room is extremely out of tune!  It sounded very dull and lifeless and the bleed from the headphones got picked up in the recording. Rather than waste the idea as i quite liked the melody that i improvised in the room i did some experiments with the track mixing it with the other tracks and rerecording the sound

Here is the original piano recording

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/piano

I decided to make a stem of the piano recording mixed with the celtic harp and use the sans amp plug in to distort the recording here are the results of that experiment.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/distorted-piano-and-harp

A photo of my mic setup for recording the piano

Here is a recording of the distorted stem tracks mixed with the Avalon rerecording of the celtic harp track and the piano recording which while sometimes the distorted parts of the composition don’t always work it certainly gives a more feeling of depth and movement to the sound it is no longer static and flat and has started to become more dynamic.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/distorted-piano-and-harp-stem

Sun Rings- Performed By the Kronos Quartet and composed by Terry Riley , Visual Component , Willie Williams. Sometimes life has a way of acting out strange synchronicities. I ‘d been recently introduced to Terry Riley’s piece In C and made a journal entry for Sound Cultures about the piece. I was really inspires by the small intertwining melodies and the way the smallest shifts in timing created such great interactions between the instruments. I think listening to this piece had a major influence in some of the melodic choices I made in composing SOL and in this weeks presentation it was mentioned how elements of the work were somewhat minimalist in its construction. I was searching the internet to sea if anyone had composed musical work using the ‘sounds’ of space and the sun and I discovered that the Kronos Quartet collaborated with NASA to create a work using recordings of Plasma waves of the solar wind made by the Voyager Twin space crafts and mixed with an orchestral score composed by none other than Terry Riley. Riley composed the themes based on the fragments of melody he heard in the recordings of the plasma waves The results are quite uplifting,  beautiful and sonorous and have a haunting etheric quality at moments the sounds of space float over the strings and singing. The two worlds of electroacoustic and chamber music blend seamlessly as a wonderful representation of the wonder of the cosmos.

http://kronosquartet.org/projects/detail/sun_rings/1

WEEK 8 PROCESS JOURNAL 8

After liking the results of adding the solar sonified data I added in a recording of the aurora to this version of the work and brought back in the recordings of hawks into the melodic elements of the work. AS I started to add more audio data as opposed to relying on just midi files it seemed to bring some life into the work which sounded a little flat. Here I’m trying to extend out the drone element at the start which in my mind reflected the more chaotic state of the early universe before star formation. The return of the melody being symbolic of life emerging as the star forms and life springs up around the sun. To me the most sucessful part of this version is the more minamalist final section but I feel that the middle section with the appergiated harp the two melodies arent quite synced in the right way and that perhaps they need more space from each other to build.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-version-8

Here is a version of the first section with just midi I felt it was important to start quiet and understated in the beginning representing the formless water. In this case Ive used the chamber voices to represent the celestial choir or the idea that ‘the word’ created the universe.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-drone-element

I decided that it was important that to really connect with the work that I not just rely on inside the box but record some tracks of me playing guitar to bring some ‘life’ and parts of myself into the recording process . i just reloaded my computer with a new operating system and I had a lot of problems with logic crashing as I tried to record guitar parts which was frustrating . I realized that it was probably time to commit and bounce out my midi parts. I could always go back to one of my earlier session files if I needed to retweek the parameters. (I always as part of my process create a new session file each time I work on a project so I can return to older versions as needed. Some interesting coincidences happened. I was using a loop pedal Ive bought but don’t really know how to use and my phase and tremolo pedals . By accident some of the sounds I got sounded very similar to the recordings of the auroura I used in my piece.

A guitar loop i accidently made that sounds like the aurora.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/guitar-aurora

A recording of the actual Aurora used in my track.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/aurora-2-1

Mix of my work with guitar parts-

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-9

The big bang theory states that all matter was contacted down to a single infinitely tiny point and expanded from there into the universe today. There was no form or space time as we know it. At this hypothetical moment light was born out of a primordial darkness. In the way of colored my piece Ive tried to make the first more drone like section darker in tone to reflect this. Going back to my conception of the dual nature of existence its interesting to note that Dark Matter a form of energy that technically can’t be seen and measured composes 95% of the universe. The formless void is literally all around us.

https://www.space.com/25126-big-bang-theory.html

http://www.big-bang-theory.com/

The idea of a formless void preceeding creation exists in the mythologies of many religions

the Book Of Genesis describes creation as such

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.   3Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.”

this to me sound very similar to the idea of the big bang with with God being the force that causes the singularity to expand. In Hesiod’s Theogny chaos is the formless void or hole from which the Gods and Cosmos emerged. Ive started to see the piece as a sonic retelling of a creation myth.

WEEK 7 PROCESS JOURNAL

1.I began working on the idea of re-integrating the lute and harp elements back into the work . Using  the Alchemy software instrument in Logic I created an arrpegiated version of my main lute melody. I liked the way this gave the melody  a kind of uplifting shimmer it seemed celestial in my mind the harps association with harps and the unreal nature of the playing as a harp could never be played like this normally.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/celtic-harp

The Image it invoked in my mind is of the traditional  Rider Waite Tarot Card  made in 1909.  In card no 19 theThe Sun a child naked rides a horse with sunflowers and a luminous sun in the background. The Sun in the Tarot appears near to the end of the mystical journey the adept makes through the Tarot. Here the fool is reborn as a child with the wisdom of experience, basking in the solar light as they are full of joy.

The symbolism of the Rider- Waite card is explained here-

“Inner Symbolism

The naked child mounted on a white horse and displaying a red standard has been mentioned already as the better symbolism connected with this card. It is the destiny of the Supernatural East and the great and holy light which goes before the endless procession of humanity, coming out from the walled garden of the sensitive life and passing on the journey home. The card signifies, therefore, the transit from the manifest light of this world, represented by the glorious sun of earth, to the light of the world to come, which goes before aspiration and is typified by the heart of a child.

But the last allusion is again the key to a different form or aspect of the symbolism. The sun is that of consciousness in the spirit - the direct as the antithesis of the reflected light. The characteristic type of humanity has become a little child therein--a child in the sense of simplicity and innocence in the sense of wisdom. In that simplicity, he bears the seal of Nature and of Art; in that innocence, he signifies the restored world. When the self-knowing spirit has dawned in the consciousness above the natural mind, that mind in its renewal leads forth the animal nature in a state of perfect conformity.”

http://www.tarotlore.com/tarot-cards/the-sun/

2. As part of my process i felt it was important to integrate some sound material

derived from the sun itself my knowledge of sonification is limited and it is something I want to explore during the semester break  as I have no knowledge of Max but it seems like to much of task to take on along with the other challenges of the work right now. However I found these audio sets of solar sounds from Stanford university from Michelson Doppler Image data which I used in my piece which you can here modulating in the sol logic mellowness file. One of the other members of class also suggested that I might use Audacity to sonify data sets and that it’s fairly straight forward so that is something I’ll look into.

http://soi.stanford.edu/results/sounds.html

I  also found a Berkley website with programs to Sonify Solar data of which you can download from NASA but unfortunately this was a dead end as it wouldn’t run with the current operating system of my Mac

http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/stereo_solarwind/sounds_programs.html

This version of my Sol composition explores a more stripped back approach but uses the appregiated harp version of the melody while mainly using the drone sounds and the solar sound file. Intended as more of an easy listening version of the piece I could see this particular version of the work acting more as a tool for meditation purposes though there is a coarseness to some of the drone sounds their are some modulations between these and the solar recording that work well. It has just enough melodic information that makes it float along and reminds me almost of a soundscape. The use of some of the drone material reminds me of Elaine Radigues work and I could see how some of these tones drawn out for long periods of time could be used like Radigue’s work to create a state of trans like medidtation

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-logic-5-mellowness

Elaine Radigue’s Kyema - She is a practicing Buddhist and her long form drone work I found to induce a state similar to ones Ive experienced in meditation.

https://youtu.be/PnbGirPTgF0

Plugins spectral gate and ring modulator used in week 6

Week 6 Process Journal

* Please note this material has already been submitted

WEEK 6- I’d been thinking about the idea of intention as actually being more important than using a system or frequency. If my intention is to activate intuition and heal than on some level it should work. Most ideas around magic energy or healing are built around the notion that intention is the most important aspect of any working. I started to feel really strongly that the melodic components of the work were important it wasn’t uplifting without them. The main melody line that I wrote in my pro-tools session kept getting stuck in my head so I decided to place it back into the work. I also began to feel that proper instruments would give it less of a flat and dull sound and that to really feel my essence was a part of the work I would need to sing and play some guitar and maybe the grand piano in the studio or bring in other musicians which I believe will be my next steps in the evolution of this piece

 1. I experimented with a hammond organ melody. This reminds me of Angelo Badalmenti’s music from Twin peaks. It has a dark brooding quality to it . Interstingly I found some person on the interenet who is convinced the 741 frequency is evil. I’d been listening to The Fire Walk With Me soundtrack a lot so it may have had an influence.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-twin-peaks-esque

  Moving through time from the Fire Walk with me soundtrack.

https://youtu.be/i3BhWXi5lzo?list=PL3bM-AujaEGm1m6Ya_9zoFx5XJncT5tav

  2. I experimented with a Lute like sound as it had mythologic links to Apollo and Orpheus which lnked back to the idea of the the Apollinic enegies of prophecy and healing as the overidding symbolic representaion of the work. Im not 100% happy with the results I need to experiment with the attack on the sound it’s a bit harsh for my liking.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-lute-experiment

  3. Choral voices-  Eventually I want to add my own singing but I decided to experiment with the Chamber Choir in the Exs24 synth in Logic it sounded pretty fake so I added a ring modulator oscillating at near 6 hz ( To match the

oscillation of the binaural beats at 6hz theta wave state) Most Modulations of plugins I tried to set to modulate around 6 hx if it sounded ok I kept it in.

I also used a spectral gate to add a touch of otherworldly almost alien presence to the voices.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-chamber-voices

  4- This is the latest iteration of the piece it starts with t the drones then introduces melodic components. There are three distinct movements which I intend to make longer sections from and record some guitar over parts I also need to quantize this to make the melody more punchy. I used a mixture of more alien spacey organ sounds and straight organ. I would also like to reintroduce the harp string sounds I had in my original composition.

https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-3

Ist Delphic Hymn to Apollo

Week 5 Process Journal

* Please note this work has already been submitted

WEEK 5- I experimented with a few different melodic ideas and using full scales and repeating melodies-1.  I was experimenting with raising pitch to give a sense the music an uplifting feeling. The track need to be quantized as the rhythm seems to shift but the basic melodic ideas can be demonstrated through these snippetshttps://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-melody-experiments 2. https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-melody-experiments-3  3. I included  a sound file of some hawks as they are considered one of the animal totems of the sun. Rather than having a strong melodic content this version contains more shimmers or trills of notes over the arpeggio structure and a softer timbre for the higher noteshttps://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-melody-experiments-2   4. I had been doing some research into the solfeggio frequencies.  The Solfeggio scale is a six-interval scale according to some sources medieval in origin and was used in Gregorian chants. At this stage I’m not a hundred precent on the validity of these frequencies if they are ‘Magic” but it seems as good a place to start as any and I have to say I felt quite lovely after working on the 741hz piece. I discovered a website that listed ways tune your guitar and piano to be exactly in tune with the 741 frequency which is meant to stimulate intution.  The closest tuning to standard concert tuning of 440 was 440.6 . In order to achieve this I had to switch my project from Protools to Logic as none of the virtual instruments in Pro-tools allow exact tunings (They are still reloading Native instruments on the school computer). Logic allows you to tune your project to any desired tuning system, which is useful. I was also getting frustrated with the virtual instruments in protools without the Native suite and find logic instruments more textutally interesting and dynamic.This website also lists corrosponding keys and suggests the key of F so I transposed my midi files down to F from G. Interestingly in terms of Magical Correspondences the 5th frequency of 741 is called Sol been traditionally a word for the Sun in the major Western Scale SOL is generally a G. I also had an idea of adapting an ancient Paean of Apollo to guitar. The Paean is one of the earliest notated pieces of music in existence and would musically work with an F based musical structure.

 Paeans - hymns of thanksgiving to the God Apollo used to avert evil and as a tool for healing. In the mind of the Ancient Greeks ideas healing and song were linked. Apollo was seen as both a God of Healing and Medicine as well as of Poetry and Prophecy thus Paeon and Paean are interrelated as ritual chant is linked through the shamanic healing arts. Singing of Spells. 1st Delphic Hymn Tuned to Just Intonation- F-F on white keys of piano Hypo Lydian Mode https://youtu.be/ws7xUHt_W4o Michael Levy first Delphic Hymn To Apollo Sacred Music of Greek Antiquity Petros Tabourishttps://youtu.be/5mIXEBxW89s    4. When I started working in Logic I decided to just work with Drones and leave the melodic functions out of the piece. I’d been reading about intervals and how they produce certain feelings. In my piece I used this idea with 5ths the main tonal building block it also interestingly led back to another reason to use F as the basis of my work. Using a pattern of ascending 5th starting with F can be used to align the chakras or energy centres of the body. I start with F as a tone to bring that sense of tuning or unity.  Interesting omitting the melody made the work seem ominous and darker somehow.https://soundcloud.com/psychotronica-1/sol-drones  

Olafur Eliasson - The weather project Turbine Hall Tate Modern London 2003

Andy Goldsworthy Dandelion and Hole - Uses the natural environment to make ephemeral land works of art.

Sketches of the solar room