Gordon's Progress Part 2

Bring it on, Charlton. I will break your blood. I'll cut your body off.

[b]Theremin Fight Club![/b]

The Beat Freq will be victorious.

Oh, yes. I will wring your modulator. I will modulate your ring.

Just wait until I unleash my SECRET WEAPON!!!!!!!! (it's a gun)

Curses! I am foiled by a cunning deployment of the Indiana Jones Stratagem.

Luigi Russolo is one of my heroes. :)

So, The Annihilist is back with Jake, and before Sonic Weekender I was working on Ascension - long delay, lots of reverb, a very full sound. To complement it I have started looking at a second piece, again a long delay, but no reverb, and not full at all - very sparse, open, with silences. And not with a narrative structure, just a soundscape. And earthbound.

A forest floor, dark and soft, squishing underfoot. Gnats. Skittering myriapods. Oozing sounds. Creaking.

Gordon,
Is this piece recorded? Have you scraped it off your foot? Can I listen?
Good Luck!

teslatheremin

I'm just starting to experiment with the idea. I like to take my time over these things, get them just so.

I watched Inland Empire a couple of days ago, and yesterday I watched the DVD extras, various interviews with Lynch. Found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said.

Here's what I got out of it, some of it. Lynch calls it dream logic and attributes it to the unified field and transcendental meditation. I think of it as the transitional phase between sense and nonsense. It doesn't come from the conscious, language shaped mind. It is the whereof of which Wittgenstein said "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Well, actually, Ludwig, No. Thereof the creative mind steps in and [i]speaks[/i] through sound and image. Lynch no more "understands" what he does than the most pretentious of critics. Because it is a visceral thing, not an intellectual one. He does it because it [i]feels[/i] right. It's hard to explain a Lynch film because they're "about" things that are better expressed in a film than in words.

Well, unless you're Samuel Beckett. He failed, of course, but failed excellently.


The soundtrack of Inland Empire is darned good by the way! Especially this guy...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzysztof_Penderecki

Well, there's one of my archive.org videos up on the interwebs, and it's from Sonic Weekend 2, the kitchen cuts, with a piece of classic film noir psycho-drama, namely Dementia, banned on first release and rereleased as Daughter Of Horror with a cheesy narration, and now in the public domain. And the music fits real purty.

It's 34 minutes long, the full album, so don't decide straight away - watch the trailer first...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-d8XEmRGow


(There's a little bit o' me givin' it some ether in it, innit. Starting shortly after "Don't tell the children." Also featuring the singing of Laura Charlton!)

Back to [i]Ascension[/i].

The trouble with pitch shifting is that, to my ears, once you add that second note the theremin stops being a lead instrument and becomes an accompanying instrument. That's why you haven't heard a lot of it in my recordings. In [i]Butterflies of Vertigo[/i] I used the expression pedal to turn it into two separate instruments (effectively) and that was one way around it.

Finally, [i]finally[/i], it dawned on me that the PS-5 can pitch shift by cents (up or down by in steps of 5 from 5 to 30, or continuously with the expression pedal) and that relates to [i]Ascension[/i].

Remember the Gamelan "ringing tones" caused by having two notes played only a few cents apart? Yes, it works just fine on the pitch shifter. (Someone on levnet suggested driving a VCA with an LFO to get ta similar effect, but this is better - the timbre varies as well as the volume, and the beat rate varies with pitch - low=slow, high=fast - unlike a tremolo.

There's also a similar thing in the Western tradition - in church organs (I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned already - there are a few organists around here) - the Celeste Stop (http://www.organstops.org/c/Celeste.html). Again with the heavenly symbolism.

It does knock the bell sound I was achieving on the head a bit - it has more of a piano-esque sound to it now, and the sound get sharper - which can be accommodated for - fairly well - by adjusting the waveform and brightness (wave=max, bright=min) of the etherwave to suit. I haven't got around to trying it on the Kees, with it's ultra-soft timbre. That could work. (Note to self - also try feeding the two notes into either side of The Annihilist when it comes back.) But for the celestial effect of the pitch shift it is worth losing the bells.