Microtonal Podcasts

Moving notice

2005-08-31T12:01:00.000-07:00

I've moved this podcast to Libsyn. Please visit us there. Update your RSS feed here.

New feed: http://podcast1024.libsyn.com/rss

Podcast1024: Kraig Grady - Crickets

2005-08-31T07:54:00.000-07:00

Listen here.
Add this feed to your Podcatching tool: http://podcast1024.libsyn.com/rss

Today's podcast is a very short but delightful piece by Kraig Grady. He calls it an experiment, but I think it's so great, I'm going to play it twice today. He writes:

I had meant to go into Logic Vocoder and see whatIi could do with noise to illustrate to Bill [Sethares] what it might do. But it didn't work at all. While I was there I somehow ended up doing this.
--
Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU <http://www.kxlu.com/main.html> 88.9 FM Wed 8-9 pm Los Angeles

It's called Crickets, and here it is. Twice since it's so short.

Podcast1024: Tidal Falls by Jonathan Szanto

2005-08-31T07:51:00.000-07:00

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Today's podcast is a piece by Jonathan Szanto, written for a dance performance. He writes:

Tidal Falls - I got called very late (4 weeks before performance) to create a score for a dance piece that already existed. The piece was metered, and has both metric and tempo changes in sections; therefore, the bulk of the piece already had an existing tempo/meter format. Flowing/falling water is the theme of the piece, including an actual working 'fountain' on stage that dancers go into. Water sounds were one of the requests.

I looked at this piece as a good place to try getting better at some of my toolset, especially in seeing what happened when I started working with a lot of multiple instances of soft instruments - how far could I task my poor little DAW? The main compositional/recording/mixing application is Sonar 4.

It's about ten minutes long. Listen and enjoy the wet goodness!

Podcast1024: Bill Sethares - Maple Manytet

2005-08-31T07:40:00.000-07:00

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Today's episode is a work in progress by Bill Sethares. From his description:

I've been working on mapping procedures to take the partials (overtones) from a sound (the source) and move them somewhere else (the destination).
The application is to create sounds (currently planning on using Kontakt [from Native Instruments]) that have spectra specially designed for particular tunings.

As I've been playing with the algorithms, I have been "trying them out" on complete mixes and have some interesting sounding results... for these two
pieces, the destination was set as all integer multiples of 65 Hz. So all of the "notes" are squished down to one big harmonic sound.

The source in this piece is Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. See if you can hear it through the rush of harmonic partials. Neat stuff.

Podcast1024: Music by Joe Pehrson, Aaron Krister Johnson, Christopher Bailey

2005-08-30T20:36:00.000-07:00

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Today's podcast will be a bit longer than usual, since I'm going to play the works of several composers - music by Joe Pehrson, Aaron Krister Johnson, and Christopher Bailey.

But first, some words of advice from Eve Beglarian, who was profiled on a podcast put together by the talented composer Corey Dargel. His podcast, called Composers and the People Who Love Them, is a terrific collection of viewpoints on one composer by a variety of personalities. And they are quite the personalities. I'm going to play a clip of Eve being interviewed by Professor Heebie McJeebie:

Play clip.

I agree with Eve.

On to the musical numbers. First up is Joe Pehrson. He writes about Inner Voices:

Inner Voices is my first electronic piece which uses software, rather than hardware, synthesizers. I'm using the z3ta+ softsynth which reads "Scala" tuning files. Therefore, virtually any intonation can be realized. In this piece, I use the “Blackjack” scale, a 21 note scale which very closely emulates just intonation (non-beating intervals) within a margin of 2 or 3 cents. The z3ta+ is a very flexible softsynth and I use no presets: all the sounds are especially created. Sonar is my sequencer host and a second software synth, the TTS-1 creates percussion effects. I use quite a few of these, since they are handled so nicely by this second synth. I’m currently completing a version for electronic playback and 2 live percussionists.

Listen to Inner Voices by Joe Pehrson.

Next piece is by Aaron Krister Johnson, and is a suite of Four Pieces for Harpsichord:

Praeludium distretto
Contrapunctus null
Eat My Two-Against-Three
ADD Crisis Center

Here's how he described them:

3rd of August, 2005- four new works for 2/5-comma meantone tuned harpsichord.

A note about the improvisations: I often do them in real-time at about half tempo, then, for a Nancarrow-like effect, they are sped up in tempo. But,
yes; they are improvised real-time. And occasionally I'll fix a sloppy flam
or something like a note not being held long enough which sounded choppy,
etc.

Listen now to Four Pieces for Harpsichord by Aaron Krister Johnson.

The final piece of the podcast is a fun romp by Christopher Bailey called "Post-industrial Nuclear Thrash Mutated Smurfette JumpFest" by Christopher Bailey. He describes it as follows:

I did it in ProTools, with a few basic plug-ins, samples, and an XV-3080 Synth. It's not systematically microtonal, just lots of random pitch-bends added to juice up the
pitches. Plus a lot of the samples are kind of weirdly colored sonorities. Beyond that, I suppose the title speaks for itself.

Listen now to music by Christopher Bailey, "Post-industrial Nuclear Thrash Mutated Smurfette JumpFest". Great stuff.

Podcast1024: Subduction Zone by Prent Rodgers

2005-04-09T18:34:00.000-07:00

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Today's piece is one I wrote, called Subduction Zone. It is scored for Alto Flute, Bass Clarinet, Guitar, Marimba, Finger Piano, and Percussion. It is based on four chords in the Partch Tonality Diamond: F 4/3 minor; A 8/5 major; C 1/1 major; and A 5/3 minor. There are many notes in common between these scales, and many more that are only slightly different. The subduction takes place where the differences lie.

For complete details about the piece, please see my web site here. The title comes from the geological phenomenon when two tectonic plates converge, and one goes under the other.

Podcast1024: Revenge of the Inorganic Compounds by Igliashon

2005-04-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

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Today's piece is by Igliashon, who writes as City of the Asleep Music at Soundclick.com. He also posts comments to the Yahoo Groups called Make Micro Music, where I get most of the music I podcast here at Podcast1024. Here's what Igliashon had to say about today's piece, written in 22 tone to the octave equal temperment:

Check out "revenge of the inorganic compounds". Decatonic [mostly, except for some Superpyth in the interlude] Metal to the EXTREEEM!!!! with some really f'ed up compound meters. Not quite the level of Mr. Stearns' work, but I'm getting there ;->. Comments highly encouraged.

-Igliashon

Comments from MakeMicroMusic at Yahoo Groups

Dave Seidel said: "Cool stuff, Ig! Keep doing it. My favorite part is the shredding ... when the second guitar joins in. Is the guitar all real-time?

"It is!" says Igliashon.

Daniel Anthony Stearns said: "Nice job mister Jones, more in this style please ."

Danny Wier said: "Oy vey! That was fun, really"

Joe Monzo said: "this is some crazy shit. i love it!"

Jonathan Szanto said: "Igs,

Bonus! Might not be too late for you guys to open for U2 and gain micro-exposure. Killer stuff."

Aaron Krister Johnson

"Fantasic--I'm glad you're going in that direction. I'm not a metal fan per se, but I'll like anything more if it has a micro-slant. This was thoroughly enjoyable; some of your best and most intricate work to date!"

All I can say is: "What he said!"

Podcast1024: Symmetrical Melodic Variation on La Monte Young's Romantic Symmetry by Dave Seidel

2005-01-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

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Today's piece is described in depth on Dave Seidel's web page here. Here's how he describes the piece:

This is a variation, in four voices of long, slowly-changing tones surrounding a central drone, on La Monte Young’s 1989 sine-tone piece The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 144 to 112 with 119. It is an electronic piece written and realized with Csound.

Dedicated to La Monte Young in his 70th year.

Duration: 9 minutes 14 seconds.

Background & Technical Details

La Monte Young’s Romantic Symmetry is a piece consisting of a chord of 22 sustained tones that express a specific set of harmonics of a 7.5 Hz fundamental frequency. All of these harmonics are prime or octaves of primes, except for 119. It is one of Young’s sine-tone installations, intended to run continuously for extended periods of time. The frequencies in the piece range from 60 Hz up to 8.64 kHz.

...

For timbral materials, I made an instrument that combines a simulation of a plucked string (using Csound’s pluck opcode) with a simple oscillator tone. I did not use a pure sine wave except for the central drone, but the other tones use relatively pure waveforms consisting of the first partial with different strengths of the 2nd, 4th, and 8th partials; since these are all octaves of the fundamental, the pitch ratios remain unmuddied.

I am indebted to Kyle Gann, without whose writings I could not have even begun to study and explore areas of La Monte Young’s work which would otherwise have been inaccessible to me.

The most intriguing thing about La Monte Young's piece is how it sounds when you move about the space. Each discrete location in a room will have a different sonority, and bring out different overtones as you walk, or turn your head. Turn this piece on at home and walk around and see if you don't experience some of that effect in your own space.

Podcast1024: Omar's Shuffle by Omar Y Los Bandelleros

2004-12-01T16:55:00.000-08:00

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Today I play a piece I wrote, called Omar's Shuffle. When it was originally released a few years ago, I claimed that I had recorded it in a bar in Ajijic, Mexico, near Guadalajara. In fact it was all done on the computer using Csound and some sound samples. The tuning is straight Just Intonation, from the Partch Tonality Diamond. Details on the story behind the song, deceitful as it may be, can be found on my liner notes page here.

Note the trumpets playing 7:9:11 against the guitar's 4:5:6. And the sharp marimbas made possible by perfect attack times. All in fun.

Podcast1024: Boogie Pie by Aaron Krister Johnson

2004-11-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

Aaron wrote to describe this piece: "You could say that it uses a 12 of 23-tet scale that Paul Erlich calls 'ripple', and that it is modelled on Conlon Nancarrow's player piano music."

The piece was generated from a MIDI file on his Korg X5DR. 23-tet means that the scale is equally divided into 23 steps, much like the 12-tet scale is divided into 12 steps. This means that there are very notes in common between 12-tet and 23-tet. They are as different as you can get, I suppose. Aaron picked 12 of these tones to use in his piece, and went to work composing. This is the result.

More information about Paul Erlich scale systems can be found here.

If you want to hear this podcast directly, click here to listen. Or drag the Podcast logo: to your iPodder or Doppler download window.

Podcast1024: Sandspice by Jonathan Szanto

2004-11-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

Of the piece SandSpice, Jon writes:

"Part of the fun of microtonality right now is the proliferation of tools, at least if one works in the virtual world. "Sandspice" is a little improvisation I did with a recent softsynth that utilizes samples of real-world instruments, combined with the ability to use non-12 tunings. In this case it is the sound of the oud, an Arabic lute (an tuned in one of the traditional Arabic modes), as well as a drone. It is paired with my love of field recordings, so the imaginary picture is an oud player sitting at the water's edge, riffing to the accompaniment of a bagpipe drone. As if that were possible."

Jon Szanto worked with Harry Partch during the latter part of his life. His primary instrument was the Boo, the bamboo marimba, but he also played the Mbira Bass Dyad and Ektara. He now maintains the excellent collection of material on Harry Partch, Corporeal Meadows. There you can find samples of the Partch instruments, pictures, scores, and marvelous memorabilia.

If you want to hear this podcast directly, click here to listen. Or drag the Podcast logo: to your iPodder or Doppler download window.

Podcast1024: Drums and Different Canons #1 by John ffitch

2004-11-23T07:33:00.000-08:00

John ffitch is well known to the Csound community for his tireless work enhancing the product over the dozen or so year's. His bio describes him as follows:

His entire professional career has been as an academic mathematician/computer scientist, and for most of that time he has been in Mathematical Sciences at Bath, where he holds the Chair of Software Engineering, a subject about which he knows little. His main interests have been in Relativity, Planetary Astronomy, Computer Algebra and LISP, but he has been known to dabble widely, for example in tank warfare, Latin poetry, Arabic linguistics, compilers, and company management, all with some lack of success. Strangely enough he won the Adams Prize for Mathematics a quarter of a century ago, but not much since. Hobbies include maintaining Csound, supervising research students, receiving and losing e-mail, and complaining about the Web.

Of the music we are about to hear, he says:

The initial idea from which this work spread was a short sequence of notes taken from a mapping of the Henon (chaos) differential equation onto pitch and duration. Certain themes in it suggested to me a piece, which developed into the current manifestation, although it has changed a great deal. The title is an echo of the well known quotation from Thoreau and the repetitive canon like structure of this differential equation. The work is in three movements, the second and third played without a break, with an introductory and closing fanfare. The first movement, the longest, is subtitled Henon, and is a slow statement of the main musical material, derived from the Henon equation. It is played mainly on a marimba-like instrument, with injections from other timbres, triggered by certain events, and taking material from the Torus chaos function. An arbitrary limit of 500 events was chosen, the 500th event being marked by a different sound. The second movement was conceived on a mountain in Austria called Gruneberg, above the town of Gmunden, which I climbed on a rainy day in September, while listening to some Xenakis on a walkman. The score is actually the same events as the first movement, but the instruments are drums, played at about twice the speed, with much stereo modifications, and there are other unstable motions of timbre. The same score is used for the last movement, but the introduction of glissandi changes the mood to a distant memory of Gruneberg. The inspiration was a distant view of hills, both from Gruneberg and from my house. It is quieter, and I hope more reflective. For the technically minded, the pitches are all taken from an 100ET scale. The piece was realised in a mixture of ANSI C and CSound. The work took about 15 months to write, and lasts about 7 minutes.

For more information on the piece, visit his description page here.

If you want to hear this podcast directly, click here to listen. Or drag the Podcast logo: to your iPodder or Doppler download window.

Podcast1024: Ostinato by Gene Ward Smith

2004-11-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

This is the most accesible work I know by a marvelous tuning theoretician named Gene Ward Smith. Gene is full of terrific ideas about tuning systems, and has an encyclodedic knowledge of the area. I picked a very single narrow range of microtonal theory, the Partch tonality diamond, for my exploration. Gene has been able to make innovations in dozens of areas. Take a look at his theory web page to get an idea what he is up to. He has information there about such areas as:

The Wedge Product
The Wedgie
The Brat
Bosanquet Lattices
TOP and Tenney Space
The seven limit lattices
Hahn Distance
Comma Sequences

I don't have a clue what they all mean, but just sit back end let this set of changes wash over you. It all makes sense after a while.

If you want to hear this podcast directly, click here to listen. Or drag the Podcast logo: to your iPodder or Doppler download window.

Mediaburn Podstation 2408

2004-11-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

Gary Santoro runs the Mediaburn weblog, which discusses all things digital on the web. He's turned to the GigaDial.net web site to post his radio links, and darned if it didn't include one of the Podcast1024 pieces, the Mirror Walk by Prent Rodgers. Thanks for the attention. GigaDial is a way to share your favorite podcast episodes with others. Gary also picked one from the BBC on the Higgs Boson, and one from his own Mediaburn Radio Weblog. See the entry at Mediaburn Podstation 2408.

GigaDial elevator pitch:

GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters. To subscribe, browse the list of recently updated stations below, or the list of all stations, and then point your podcatcher at the station feed, linked from the XML button on each station's page.

Podcast1024: Foum by Jacob Barton

2004-11-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

Everyone in the Making Microtonal Music Yahoo Groups has gone wild over a new piece by Jacob Barton, Foum, or Xenharmonic Variations on a Theme by Mozart (jacob barton, microtonal player piano).

Well at least three people said great things about it. And in this business, that's a horde! I heard it and totally flipped for it. Here is Jacob's description of Foum from his Soundclick page Fun With Xenharmonicity:

Seven variations. On Mozart.
That's right.
And they felt so goooood.

And this from his post to Making Microtonal Music at Yahoo Groups:

This just out:

Seven variations. Each in a different root of two. Something for everyone.
...
Also this notion of an innate "mood" supplied by the tuning - any thoughts there? Also, what's your favorite moment?

It starts out like a regular Mozart piano piece, and then veers off to another planet. If you are driving while you are listening, I recommend you pull over now.

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We're Famous!

2004-11-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

kinrowan has graciously written up a review of Podcast1024 in his "New New Podcast Review" web page and podcast. What a trip! If I knew what a track-back was, and if Blogger supported them I'd be doing it. knrowan says:

I'm inclined to agree with Prent that anyone interested in music at all should have a little of this in their daily musical diet. In fact, it would be wonderful if Prent published this on an absolutely daily basis, but that's a pretty tall order. It would also be nice if Prent would give a little larger tidbit of information in his intro; I would be very happy to have Prent tell us a little about microtonal music in general in every 'cast, to help those of us who don't quite get it yet (OK, to help me) - he does give some details in most 'casts, but sometimes they assume more of a basis in the ideas behind microtonal music than his potential podience is likely to have.

Thanks for the plug! We're up to 50 RSS feeds a day now. Any more and I'd blush.

Podcast1024: Stolen Stars by Kraig Grady

2004-11-20T07:36:00.000-08:00

Today's music is an excerpt from an acoustic performance of Kraig Grady's Stolen Stars. Kraig is the North American ambassador from the nation of Anaphoria. He is an instrument builder, composer, as well as one of the top political officials of this island nation. Check out the flag of Anaphoria on the right. More stories of Anaphorian lore can be found on Kraig's web page.

I like the music. Sit back and relax. More is on the way as soon as Kraig can send me a CD of the rest of the pieces. Kraig and I both worked with Erv Wilson in the 70's to learn about microtonality.

If you want to hear the podcast directly, click here to listen drag the Podcast logo here: to your iPodder or Doppler download window.

Podcast1024: Arbor Low by Dante Rosati

2004-11-18T16:44:00.000-08:00

Today's music is by Dante Rosati, called Arbor Low. The piece is written for 21 tone just intonation guitar, and performed by the composer. Arbor Low is the name of a prehistoric henge he visited in Derbyshire, England. For more information on the tuning of the guitar, see Dante's guitar web page.

If you want to hear the podcast directly, click here to listen or add this RSS feed to your iPodder or Doppler download window.

Houston Chronical writes about podcasting - Mentions Adam Curry

2004-11-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

Here's a good laymen's explanation of what Podcasting is:
HoustonChronicle.com - Computing

Podcast1024: Preludes 1-3 for 19 tone piano by Jeff Harrington

2004-11-15T20:32:00.000-08:00

This is a performance of the first through third of his Preludes for 19 Tone Piano by Jeff Harrington. Notice the terrific power of the piano to focus the ear on the harmonic material available in 19 tone temperment. You can see scores and much more music by Jeff on his web page. Jeff also has a page that describes the techniques he used to create the final wave file versions using Timidity and specialized sound fonts.

If you want to hear the podcast directly, click here to listen or add this RSS feed to your iPodder or Doppler download window.

Podcast1024: Mirror Walk by Prent Rodgers

2004-11-15T20:06:00.000-08:00

This is a piece I wrote for a combination of instruments. They include cello, violins, double bass, tuba, contrabassoon, oboe, flutes, finger piano, harp, vibraphone, french horn and many different trombones. All are subject to up and down sampling to create tiny versions of the instruments. A tenor trombone, downsampled by a few notes and then taken up an octave sounds like a sopranino trumpet. All instruments can glissando, including the harp, finger piano, oboe, flute, and cello.

There is a great deal of indeterminacy in my music. In this piece, each instrument can sometimes choose from many different alternative measures at any one time. At other times, they are more constrained. The trombone, oboe, and finger piano accompaniments had many choices, but are still constrained to a short list. Later in the song they could chose from many more alternatives. Some interesting parts showed up just because it was their time to be heard. I especially like the oom-pah-pah part at 2:45, following some trombone glissandi. I like to think of it as an improvisation, subject to control. It was created using Csound.

If you want to hear the podcast directly, click here to listen or add this RSS feed to your iPodder or Doppler download window.

The New, New Podcast Review: Dave Winer: Podsafe Music

2004-11-15T16:46:00.000-08:00

Please note that all music posted here 100% Podsafe by Dave Winer's definition. See the New, New Podcast Review and Dave's Scripting news. I've obtained all the composers permission to podcast all the material.

Releasing RadioPod from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent

2004-11-15T09:29:00.000-08:00

This is news to me. A way to record streaming radio stations, convert to MP3, and provide an RSS feed for Podcatching. Looks like it needs a Unix or Linux server, or a version of Perl though.

Releasing RadioPod from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent

Podcast1024: The Stuffed Ones by Christopher Bailey

2004-11-14T07:55:00.000-08:00

This is a suite of four pieces for microtonal piano by Christopher Bailey. The Stuffed Ones a brief set of character pieces about his stuffed animals.

Goopy, the impetuous, angry, volatile little doggie.
Ellie, the lumbering elephant.
Ziggy, floating, always floating . . . . .
Towelbear, bouncing back and forth on his bow legs.

The pieces are in 11-tone equal temperment. Chris writes: "I don't really think of them as "piano" pieces, but rather has being written for my XV-3080 synth (there are definitely a lot of non-piano sounds!). The tool I used was MicroMidi". For more info, see his page.

If you want to hear the podcast directly, click here to listen or add this RSS feed to your iPodder or Doppler download window.

Podcast1024: Wasatch Front by Prent Rodgers

2004-11-13T06:26:00.000-08:00

This is another piece by me, Prent Rodgers. It's called Wasatch Front, and it was written for microtonal woodwind quintet.

The piece makes extensive use of glissandi to move from one key to another in a chord progression derived from the Partch tonality diamond. The movement is enhanced by simulating the Doppler Effect with envelopes that make the sound seem to be moving toward or away from the listener. I try to link the pitch movement dictated by the Partch scale to the speed of movement through audio space. Much more information in the liner notes on my web page here.
If you want to hear the podcast directly, click here to listen or add this RSS feed to your iPodder or Doppler download window.