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Bottoms Up! (or, from micro to macro) ::
Perhaps continuing on yesterday’s entry, last night I was writing to a friend about how I approach making music:
I’ve been in what I’ve come to recognize as the first phase of a cycle that will eventually culminate in finished music if I persist: acquiring/building/learning tools, assembling a palette of timbres, samples, and loops (all the same thing just in different lengths)—and at some point I’ll see beyond the brushes and palette to the painting I’ve been looking for.
Then coincidentally (well, not *that* coincidentally, I had sent a “how are you” first), this morning I got an email from somewhat I’d met at a computer music conference last month, which had first gotten me thinking about how at the microscopic level, digital audio is just a series of numbers, each representing the amplitude of a 23 microsecond blip in time (assuming a 44.1 kHz sampling rate as on compact disc). String together enough samples and play them repeatedly, and we perceive a timbre. Small arrays of samples are perceived as simple and harsh timbres. Put together a longer series of samples and we hear more interesting timbres and timbres that modulate. Over longer periods, we begin to perceive events or “notes,” be they timbral shifts or changes in amplitude, attacks, Events become phrases which become motifs which become the building blocks of composition.
I’ve found that as a programmer I favor a bottom-up approach in implementation (though it seems I usually have at least a vague notion of the big picture when I start), and so I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me to realize that I’m a bottom-up synthesist too.
At the conference it had occurred to me that I might really enjoy learning about granular synthesis (Bill Punch: “Granular Synthesis combines grains of sound into sound masses. Each grain is typically a very short-duration sound event comprised of a frequency, duration, amplitude, starting time, and an envelope. Sound masses are created by the combination of potentially thousands of sound grains to form musical compositions.”).
Have I been looking at the telescope icon in Logic (which I’m just learning) too long?
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