Los Angeles, California
Csound, ecasound, Ascore, Mscore
I’m into ambience music similar to Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Steve Roach and others. One of my foci is the stimulation of coherent consciousness with music. In one sense this is a tall order, in another sense all music has this effect. I take as my archetype Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno, or the ambient passages of Biff Johnson’s Reading The Bones. For music generation I use a combination of Csound sound generation and keyboard synthesizer recording with my own scoring, midi and mixing tools, and the Csound mixer modified to mix up to two hundred files. I have found ecasound to be an excellent editing tool as well as useful for multitrack recording.
Twilight Footsteps. (2009) twilight footsteps
I wrote another piece inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s story Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. In the story, this would transpire after The Seven Hundred Steps (see below). Randolph Carter is traversing a dreamland forest inhabited by creatures called Zoogs. This is all rendered with the Yamaha ES6 and Motif rack, scored and compiled, I might add, with my Ascore and Mscore scripts.
Lake of Thoughts, part 4 (ideas). (2008) lake of thoughts, part 4
A continuation of the trend of Lake of Thoughts, part 3, and a continued effort to find the space-ambience zone in the sonic landscape. One must resist the natural disposition to make it sound interesting, which would detract from its effect of focusing thought. The technique is simply mixing layers of sound with no special software besides the Csound mixer (well, a few AWK scripts never hurt).
Lake of Thoughts, part 3 (parallax). (2008) lake of thoughts, part 3
The art of space-ambience music is not as easy as it sounds. The approach turns out to be somewhat counter-intuitive to work, but I think this genre is important enough to deliver the effort. The “lake of thoughts” is, of course, that place we dwell in when working on some mathematical or philosophical idea--that platform on a sea of glass where we have attained to undisturbed, disembodied, lucid thought. Brian Eno set the direction for ambience music that allows the mind to concentrate with his “Thursday Afternoon” piece. My treatment of space-ambience follows Eno’s idea by trying to create a mental lens with the music: the music should not unduly draw attention to itself but carry you on a sonic flow.
Night Gaunt. (2007) night_gaunt
The book, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft seems to have taken my focus for awhile. This composition is the third that I based on the story. The story takes a fantastic turn when Randolph Carter is seized by the Night Gaunts. Why should anyone write music about Randolph Carter and his confrontation with the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep? I believe music should be about people and having fun. I wrote my own code for randomizing an ascore pattern to get a rain effect on the cymbals. For this piece a wrote some special C code for resampling multiple sound files. There’s an effect I’ve wanted to do but haven’t had the tools. It was in about 1981, using the sequencer in a PAIA synthesizer kit and the awesome reverb of a (then budget-priced) Tapco mixer that I began trying out music based solely on the whirling, whiney sound of an overdriver sequencer in reverb. My interest in physics took me away from music for the next twenty years--and then ambient, space music developed into a genre in its own right. Alas, I could have been in on the ground floor with the PAIA and the awesome Tapco. So I wrote some C code for the recreation, in software, of the overdriven sequencer. As a bonus, I got some nice pitch-bending effects from it.
The Seven Hundred Steps (2006) www.mp3.com.au/alsteffens
The theme of this piece is from the book, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft. In the book, the entry to the dream world is down The Seven Hundred Steps to the Gates of Deeper Sleep. My intention is to invoke the dissolving awareness of the semi-conscious state. The descent is into deep and unending darkness until at last the strange luminescence and odd ambience of the dream world is obtained. For best results, it should be played at a low volume in the dark after many hours of concentration on mathematics.
Book of Luminance (2006) www.mp3.com.au/alsteffens
This is my sixth composition, but was not scored with Csound. This is an trance ambience
piece. This deserves the description of
ambience because it is not melodic or rythmic. I felt like I landed in the right
place with this piece, and it came out being the most ruccas-like piece of my ruccas
entries. The piece was performed on a Yamaha
DX7 and recorded using ecasound software.
Sagittarius Rex (2005) www.mp3.com.au/alsteffens
My fifth composition. I’m trying to float you into outer space. The electric organ comes from the DX7-to-Csound library. The violin is the Csound wgbow instrument. My first attempt to make choir oohs and aahs is a resampling from the Personal Copy soundfont.
Osgiliath (2005) www.mp3.com.au/alsteffens
This was my fourth composition. Osgiliath is an abandoned city in The Lord of the Rings that lies on the battlefield between Gondor and Mordor. I’m trying to learn how to write in the ambience, space music style. The strings are resampled from a freely available soundfont file called Personal Copy. The plucked instrument is my own “freehand” FM csound instrument.
Ice Dancer (2005) www.mp3.com.au/alsteffens
My third composition was an attempt to prove that I could write something very upbeat. This piece takes after my influences from the progressive rock of the 1970s. I relied almost entirely on the DX7-to-Csound library of FM algorithms for electric organ and bass guitar. I resynthesized the drums a little better than on A Cat Enters Avalon, but MP3 compression makes drum resampling a science. I actually think this is the best thing I’ve done, which figures since nobody likes it.
A Cat Enters Avalon (2004) cat_enters_avalon_256.mp3
This was my second composition. It was inspired by a friend of mine named Gaby. I hope he makes it to Avalon. This piece takes after my influences from the progressive rock of the 1970s. I relied almost entirely on the DX7-to-Csound library of FM algorithms (DX7 is a Yamaha FM synthesizer of 1985 vintage) for strings, electric organ and bass guitar. Here I used the Csound waveguide violin function called wgbow (bowed instrument). I had some drum set samples that I resynthesized badly and made worse by crunching the song into 128-bit MP3.
Horizon (2004) horizon.mp3
This was my first Csound composition. It’s just a few guitar chords to showcase my plucked string sound. During my initial tinkerings with Csound I began researching how to create authentic sounding instruments. I first began seeing material an “physical modeling” around 2002. There was a site (Harmony Central?) that contained some good introductory material on digital waveguide synthesis as well as normal mode expansions, and it offered some plucked string sample WAV files (created with Csound). I was fairly impressed with the sound samples. I did some coding on my own to do some simple waveguide synthesis and gave up on it. Speaking as a programmer with a background in physics, I felt that this approach was distastefully complicated from the code point of view. In particular, I see the rich harmonic content of musical sound as a consequence of musical instruments being systems of coupled resonators. The implimentation of reflection and transmission at a multitude of boundaries (resonator couplings) presented to me a major coding design effort. This in itself would not stop me from plunging into it, but I think an easier approach was available: normal mode expansion. I find that there is nothing about normal mode synthesis mentioned in the online literature. The only reason I can see for this is that the computer music world is the child of electrical engineers, and electrical engineers didn’t learn about normal modes in school. In the undergraduate physics textbook this is found in the chapter on coupled oscillations. These readings will not necessarily lead to the application of musical instrument modeling, but where it begins to be put altogether is, I think, in “The Theory of Sound”, J.W.S. Rayleigh, 1894. In section 126 he begins treatment of the plucked string and follows this with the pianoforte string. You will see that his mode functions are sine functions over a string of uniform material. In order to get interesting harmonics (eigenfrequencies) the string should be divided into regions of different sound speeds (coupled resonators). Then the modes (eigenfunctions) will no longer be simple sine functions. This is where numerical software becomes practical. I put a monumental amount of work into a software program that will do modal decomposition in 1, 2, and 3 dimensions, called HMD for Computer Modeling. Since the stretched string problem is one-dimensional, you can do this quite simply (well…) with Scilab or Matlab. The mode expansion I used in Horizon was done with Scilab: model the string as a set of masses and springs and calculate the frequencies and mode shapes. You create a Csound instrument that performs additive synthesis with these frequencies. You pick one location in the mode function (as a pickup position). The initial results sounded promising enough that I scrapped together a few score lines in Csound to create some guitar chords. I compelled someone hostile to computer music (my wife) to listen to it, and a grin and a giggle was to me solid confirmation that it really did sound like a guitar. So I decided to become a Csound composer. I am sharing a Csound orchestra file that contains 2 of the guitar string instruments used in Horizon.
For those of you interested in mathematical acoustics and the theory of sound, in particular the modeling of standing wave modes in musical instruments, I am the author of a finite element modeling software called HMD for Computer Modeling. It offers a fairly standard approach to finite elements--subdividing a continuous region into “elements” such as lines, triangles and tetrahedrons. It has the beginnings of an interactive workspace like Matlab. It is a command-line program that produces data files for output, so you have to use your own favorite graphics program for displaying the results. Also, the wire-frame mesh for the elements must be produced with a separate program called GMSH. The software is freely available for download (as is GMSH) and was created under the GNU public license. I’ve put a lot of work into it, but it still has many shortcomings. If there are any mathematically-inclined programmers who would like to contribute to its development, I would be happy to hear from you.
I am also interested in music composition software. I am a Csound (unofficial csound for linux) user, and I have written my own front end for Csound. It is called Ascore (guess how many seconds it took me to think of this name), and I have used it to compose all of my Csound compositions. It is not an X-based tool but rather a simple text file parser. The idea is that musical passages are grouped as pattern macros, and the names of the macros are entered into a “tracks” section where each text column is a track. Simultaneous patterns are entered on the same row in the tracks section. You may look at it for yourself here.
I was born in 1955 in Sacramento, California. I had some small training in music as a boy in the school concert band, playing trombone, clarinet, and saxophone. Then again, I had a little music theory in high school. The lads persuaded me to get a bass guitar and rock out, after which I was introduced to jazz, avante garde, and progressive rock. In 1974, I heard Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s, “No Pussyfooting”, one of the first space music albums, which profoundly influenced my musical tastes. In 1975, my young musical career reached its peak in a Sacramento progressive rock group called Opus Fluke, which sounded most like Gentle Giant, but which was actually quite too original for Sacramento. During this time I was indirectly (through association with fellow band members) aquainted with a Sacramento Symphony percusionist named Stan Lunetta, who was the founder of an avante-garde percusion group called Amra Arma. Stan was known for his electronic obelisks that generated oscillator sequences in a pseudo-random fashion. I took a false step in my musical direction by falling out of this association in order to pursue more conventional pop music, but which I abandoned a short time later. I spent the larger part of the 1980’s as a physics student at the University of California at Davis and at San Diego. My interested in music was gradually replaced by an interest in astrophysics, stellar structure and evolution in particular. I received a Master of Science in physics from UCSD in 1989, after which I have worked as a programmer at Rocketdyne. In 1999, I discovered Csound on the internet and immediately realized its potential to create any kind of sound, given the knowledge to make it work. After five years of tinkering, and overcoming the inhibition that I’ve been away from music for too long, I started to try writing with Csound. I soon realized that you can make no progress at all with Csound without a front end to generate the score. After looking at the existing Csound front ends I decided to create my own, which is based around the idea of defining note patterns as macros and inserting them into parallel time tracks. My Csound composition expresses the fun of creating music on the one hand, and an interest in the science of musical sound on the other.
tags: artist audio csound ascore hmd scilab