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Xenharmonic triad, part 1

F. F. F. Fiale: “Quattro supernovate in faccia”

From the album Possible Worlds (2011)

One of the phenomena of 20th and 21st-century music I find most consistently fascinating is the constellation of investigation and experiment around the idea of challenging the hegemony of 12-tone equal temperament (12-tet), the tuning system that has prevailed in European-influenced music since the late 1800s.

These efforts are known by different names: one term, “microtonality,” was popularized in the early 20th century and is still used today. It is used to describe tuning systems based on an interval smaller than the tempered semitone (minor second), which is the intervallic atom of 12-tet. Under the auspices of microtonality, composers such as Julian Carrillo, Alois Hába, and Ivan Wyschnegradsky delved into the possibility of scales with 24, 31, 48, 72, or more tones within the octave.

But microtonality proved to be an insufficient concept to explain every alternative to 12-tet. What about systems based on the division of the octave into fewer than 12 equal parts? Or systems that rejected the very notion of a single repeated modulus, building instead a network of relations of varying and incommensurable intervallic distances? Or the various forms of just intonation?

To encompass these possibilities, the American composer Ivor Darreg coined the term “xenharmonic,” which describes all music that works outside the system of 12-tet, whether strictly microtonal or not. (The concept of microtonality, for better or worse, has survived and is occasionally used in a broad sense as a synonym for “xenharmonic.”)

In the next three posts, I will feature three examples of xenharmonic music, a kind of mini-tour of the genre. (Those interested may also want to revisit xenharmonic compositions I’ve explored in previous posts.) We’ll begin from the present and work backward through time. 

The first example comes from the compilation album Possible Worlds, released by Spectropol Records in July of this year, which provides an excellent survey of the stylistic diversity of contemporary xenharmonic music. The album can be downloaded free from the label’s Bandcamp page.

I chose this track to demonstrate an approach to xenharmonic music from outside the classical tradition with which alternate systems of tuning are generally associated. ”Quattro supernovate in faccia” (“Four Supernovas in Your Face”), by Fabrizio Fulvio Fausto Fiale, an Italian musician and a self-described “classical pianist, choir singer, and death metal drummer,” is a “crazy virtual jam session,” based on two kinds of esadecaphonic (16-tone) scales.

August 14, 2011, 12:36pm

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Tristan Perich: 1-Bit Symphony, Movement 1 (2010)

I am of two minds about the chip music phenomenon.

On the one hand, as any reader of this blog will know, I am an unapologetic partisan of low-bit sound. A raw square wave from a SID chip affects me the way I imagine the swell of a string quartet would have touched the soul of a nineteenth-century Viennese. 

But at the same time, I’m wary of the mood of fetishistic technostalgia that hangs over the whole endeavor. I want to believe that chip music can be something more than the rehashing of unimaginative dance music via “new” Gameboy arrangements to create muzak for the Nintendo generation.

So I was intrigued to learn of the “1-bit music” pioneered by the New York-based composer Tristan Perich. (In digital audio terms, 1-bit means that the sounds are essentially binary—either on or off. More bits mean more “detail,” more possible gradations of volume or timbre.) Perich’s two “albums” consist of CD jewel cases with a battery-powered circuit glued inside. As you can see from the image below, the circuit contains, from left to right, the battery, an on-off switch, the sound-chip, a button to skip through the tracks, a volume knob, and a headphone jack. When the switch is flipped, the chip begins to play.

There’s something undeniably fascinating about seeing the physical components that create the sound—what Perich calls “the transparency of the circuit.” His albums are like digital music boxes: the music is not played back, as in a recording, but “performed” right before your eyes.

But what’s the difference, really, between ones and zeros being read off a disc by a laser and the equivalent information flowing from a chip in one of Perich’s configurations? It seems that in the digital domain, the once-pivotal distinction between the “live” and the recorded is effaced once and for all. Depending on your perspective, you could say that the playback of a recording constitutes a performance, or that the apparent performance is a kind of playback.

The unique format of Perich’s albums has overshadowed the originality of his music. His two “chip” albums differs considerably: 1-Bit Music features 11 relatively short pieces whose style ranges from rather abstract sound-studies to catchy numbers evocative of Commodore 64 soundtracks. 1-Bit Symphony, as befits the title, has five longish movements and a much richer, “orchestrated” sound. Although by no means derivative, the music is heavily influenced by American minimalism—Perich cites Philip Glass as a major influence—and the historical idiom of video game composition.

Perich’s other music, composed for various combinations of 1-bit sound and conventional instruments, I find less compelling, although the timbral effect is sometimes quite stunning. More interesting is his Interval Studies, a recent sound installation based on microtonal clusters formed by panels dotted with tiny loudspeakers, each emitting a single tone.

August 05, 2011, 11:13am

Giorgio Sancristoforo: Variations on Incontri di Fasce Sonore (2011)

Using the sound material of Incontri di Fasce Sonore by Italian composer Franco Evangelisti, Giorgio Sancristoforo uses a Buchla unit to trigger sounds in MAX/MSP in a brilliant attempt at a “live remix” of a seminal piece of 1950s electronic music.

Sancristoforo’s website is a veritable cabinet of curiosities, and includes such wonders as:

• Berna, a software emulation of the classic electronic music studio of the 1950s (an idea from my dreams, but sadly for Mac only) 
• the Roton, a lovely graphic score inspired by Cornelius Cardew’s famous Treatise, comprising 23 circular plastic transparencies
• and, perhaps most surprisingly, an album of blazing, four-on-the-floor neo-disco realizations.

July 28, 2011, 11:31am

Pierre Sauvageot and Lieux Publics: Harmonic Fields

Sound installation, Martigues, France, June 2010

June 22, 2011, 10:14am

Musica mundana update, June 2010 

Two excellent stories to which I was alerted this morning by NPR, which unfortunately used them as a cutesy segue into a feature on the “real music” of some boring singer/songwriter.

First, physicists at CERN in Geneva are “sonifying” the data from their experiments with the Large Hadron Collider in order to render perceptible these microcosmic interactions— and perhaps, to better understand them.  The project, entited “LHC Sound,” is a collaboration between CERN and a group of physicists, musicians, and artists in London.  Unfortunately, this “particle music” sounds a lot like second-rate computer music circa 1998.  Nonetheless, intriguing work.

The Large Hadron Collider. Is it a coincidence it looks like the Pompidou Center?

Second, scientists at the University of Sheffield in England have recently used satellite images of the vast “coronal loops” shot off by the sun to measure the frequency of their vibrations and transpose the result into the range of human hearing.  The scientists studying these phenomena say that the magnetic disturbances sometimes behave like a plucked guitar string (transverse waves), in other cases like air through a wind instrument (longitudinal waves).  Analysis of the sounds is being used to prepare for an anticipated “space storm” in 2013.

I find it fascinating that virtually all of the “nature music” discovered in recent years— whether microcosmic or macrocosmic— sounds like post-1950 experimental electronica.  Is nature imitating art here, or vice versa?

June 25, 2010, 11:06am