I’m not ready to talk about what I’ve landed on for parts 3 and 4, but I do want to talk about the initial idea that I landed on for part 2 – bee swarms. Bee sounds, particularly in swarms, have a lot of personality to them and can be translated in a myriad different ways into a sonic art. I found a dozen or so public domain sounds of bees that I really liked and started listening to them over and over again trying to determine how I could shape the aural narrative of the work.

I was struggling to pick a direction that I really liked, so I decided to do some basic research on bees for inspiration. I knew most of the basics and some fringe knowledge about things like colony collapse disorder and that the population of bees are declining, but it wasn’t until I dug into it more that my eyes were opened to the true facts and myths about bees. Once I dug deep enough, I realized that I had no choice but to scrap the bee swarm idea from Through the Sonic Glass completely.

The reason? Including bee sounds in a work whose central thesis is dangerous/hostile environments spreads misinformation and perpetuates a myth that damages our global ecosystem. Not only are most bees not a threat to humanity (with the exception of Africanized honey bees), they are essential for pollenating the world’s crops and unnecessary eradication of them due to apiphobia (fear of bees) has potentially irreversible consequences on our food supply.

I wrestled to find ways to justify its inclusion because the sonic environment is so fascinating. I tried to argue with myself that since Fast-Paced World was taking a dangerous sonic environment and recontextualizing it into something more peaceful and serene, I could weave a similar narrative with bees and make it more educational and promotional. The problem is that without what would be an extremely long essay of a program note, its inclusion could easily be misinterpreted, especially with surrounding movements whose premise starts with Actual Dangerous environments rather than perceived ones.

On the one hand, it saddens me because I started to get really immersed in that sonic world, but on the other hand, I consider this as a tabling rather than a trashing. It doesn’t belong in Sonic Glass, but it could belong in a different work, one that could not only avoid spreading a false narrative but perhaps make an active effort to abolish it and dispel the myth. We’ll see what happens in the future, but for now? Back to the drawing board.

Seems obvious, right? But somehow I still don’t do it often enough. For example:

Late last week, the nienteForte staff had a meeting with a group involved in a Top Secret Project that we’re putting together for our Season 11 opener next October. I’m one of the composers that’s going to be writing on that project, and as we explored some of the parameters around it, I found myself soaking in all of the information as initial groundwork, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to actually do with it.

Then, last night, I went to a concert featuring New York contemporary guitarist Giacomo Baldelli, and as I was sitting listening to the fourth piece on the program, the structure for the piece that I wanted to write for the project just hit me. How I wanted to use the space, the performers, the kind of material that I was going to use – it ran into me and hit me like a brick, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

A long time ago during my undergraduate studies, I wrote a flute trio called Shades of Three. That piece was based around each flute having a spotlight moment around a single musical form. While those spotlight moments are similar, they have small differences in them that the other flutes support before the climax where all three flutes then spotlight together in harmony.

The piece I’m going to write for this project feels like a spiritual sibling to Shades of Three. It’s tentatively titled Forces of Fours, and it expands on the idea of “spotlight” by layering multiple kinds of spotlights throughout the work – the creative form and material dictated by me as the composer, the creative mix of strict vs improvised material dictated by the choices made by the individual performers, and the instruments themselves which deserve their own spotlight.

We’ll see what comes of it as I start writing it – I’m not in a space to put serious work into it yet as I still have to finish the piece that I’m writing for the Portland Percussion Group, but no doubt that as that piece progresses and as I get more steeped into this current season’s concerts with nienteForte and with Versipel in particular, my creative momentum will continue to move forward.

Pretty exciting year ahead.

I recently uploaded a video that betas this concept. It’s me playing through a Beat Saber song, showcasing three different difficulties: Hard chart on the left, the Expert chart on the middle, and the Expert+ chart on the right.

The problem I’m encountering has to do with audio isolation. The concept that I have for the project is that when someone faces a particular wall, I want the listener to hear only the audio for the wall that they’re facing with all other audio muted. That’s not generally how 360/ambisonic audio is treated – it’s easy enough to make whatever direction you’re facing the strongest audio in a 360 mix, but you still hear all of the other audio from the direction that it’s coming from and there doesn’t seem to be a built in process to change the levels that you hear depending which way you face.

For the Beat Saber video above, this isn’t a huge deal since the audio is for all intents and purposes the same on all three sides, but if I were to create a video where, say, I wanted to highlight my favorite three tracks in Beat Saber in a single video, it would be an aural mess.

Not sure what the solution for this is, but I’ll continue to do research. In the meantime, these Beat Saber vids work out pretty well, so I’ll be uploading more of those periodically in the immediate future.

I wrote in an earlier blog entry about my desire to explore atypical ways of using the role of text in music, and that’s going to be the central narrative thread of the piece for Byrne:Kozar:Duo. As the idea of that piece starts to take shape, I’m coming to a conclusion that while I want to separate the vocal performer from being a dominant force in the music because text does that by default, that doesn’t mean that I want the text to be unimportant – if anything, the opposite is true, that I want the associative separation of the text from the performer to elevate the importance of the text and its meaning by allowing the trumpet to take more of an equal part in text discovery.

When approached in that light, the actual composition of the piece feels like it will not itself break new ground in its form – the text is telling a story, and the music is meant to support that story. But the atypical contextual framework of how that story is told will hopefully imprint it with my distinct character in a manner not dissimilar to how the film Memento might be telling a story like any other movie but tells it in a way that no other film before or after has been able to do.

So the evolution of the piece’s creation will likely come directly from the narrative – in that, even my initial conceptual idea of “in the first third it will be fragmented, in the second third it will be combined, and in the last third it will bring comprehension” has changed to be less disciplined in its performer roles and in its structure, particularly if the text is a long one (my current top choice for text use is Jabberwocky).

The piece I’m planning on writing for the Portland Percussion Group is highly contrasting to this approach – the text content isn’t significant in itself other than to establish the type of content it represents. It’s not telling a story, it’s a series of unrelated phrases that are categorized by a singular theme – legal disclaimers and warnings. So the creative evolution of the piece is more dictated by how I choose to organize both the music and the text. The overall tone of the piece is also going to be lighter, more comedic, and that has its own set of challenges because the text has a gimmicky nature – which is fine, but it can’t *just* be gimmicky, it needs to change and evolve into something more than its surface gimmickyness.

We’ll see how things develop as I start writing both of the works – it will be interesting to see if working on these pieces side by side will at all influence each other.

I haven’t written for a lot of voice nor listened to a lot of contemporary music that features voice, but it struck me how the inclusion of voice sets up an expectation of hierarchy – the voice is usually the dominant force for which everything else is accompaniment. Even when the voice isn’t actually performing, the material that other instruments play feel transitionary – something that serves as a breather for the voice. Going even further, it’s also not uncommon for the music of the voice to be subservient to the actual text.

When Erin Gee was featured during one of our nienteForte seasons, she did a clinic about how her approach to voice was different, that her Mouthpiece works didn’t use voice to speak text as much as sounds, which had the effect of making the voice simply another instrument with no elevated emphasis or meaning over anyone else. As I start conceiving of the music I’m going to be writing over the next year that involves voice, I find myself drawn to creating a variation of that idea, although my initial thoughts about it aren’t so much about reducing the emphasis of the vocal performer as much as elevating the emphasis of the instrumentalist in some way.

What’s rolling around in my head right now is this idea of having both performers sing/speak text, but one performer does just the vowels and the other does just the consonants. There’s some practical considerations to be experimented with there (especially since a wind instrument can’t play and speak at the same time), but I could see that as being an asset for text discovery. We’ll see what I can do with it in the next few weeks.

First off, I found it fascinating to get different people’s reactions to it during its premiere performances, primarily which parts of the piece that they liked the most. It was spread pretty evenly across all three movements and all for different reasons, and I think that makes the piece a success because different parts can appeal to a wide variety of people.

At this point for me personally, I find that I dislike the second movement the most. Part of that comes from some of the technical difficulties in error-free execution – the primary reason I want to potentially use Antescofo in the first place – but another part is that the metronomic nature of the movement means that it’s structurally the most rigid and inflexible, limiting the performer’s ability to add their own personal musical expression and leaving little margin for mistakes in execution. In the first and last movement, the electronics are the vehicle for the performer being the forefront, whereas in the second movement, the performer ends up being a vehicle of the electronics as a forefront. That feels counter to why the piece is in an interactive form in the first place – if i wanted it to be like that, I would have just created a tape accompaniment for the performer to play to. I’m not sure what to do about that given the nature of the material, but it’s something I’m thinking about as a consideration for use of that mechanic for future works.

The amount of work I put into the Max programming was a significant time chunk, although I would say that the time invested was well worth it – I learned a lot about MSP, a side of Max that I had never really used before, and all of the patches I created that went into this project can be more easily reused and adapted for future works as opposed to having to start from scratch. Even so, it’s worth remembering that creating a work that involves interactive electronics with the kind of attention to detail that I require as a fairly detail-oriented musician and a programmer doubles or more than doubles the amount of time and energy that I would put into any other kind of composition.

That might seem like something that would discourage me, but it actually does quite the opposite. The work I did on this project and the passion I had and still have for its final outcome has helped me realize that I think I have a lot of unique things to say in the interactive electronic medium that could have a lot of legs for my compositional career. I’m hoping that after tweaking the Max programming to make it as error free as possible, I can get this performed in Oregon and Pennsylvania with my alma mater universities, but I also have ambitions to publish this work and have it potentially played by other trumpet performers. If that happens, that could encourage me to devote more energy to the interactive electronic space as well as open up future opportunities and commissions for those that might come across this work and find it valuable.

Where I go from here immediately will take shape in the next few years. I’m close to closing a commission to write a wind ensemble piece for the spring of 2020 here at Tulane, which will be the first time I’ll have written for a large concert ensemble since beauty…beholder back in 2012. I’m also close to closing a commission deal to write a percussion duet for the 2018-2019 school year. That will likely be purely acoustic, as I already have a few conceptual ideas that are best fit in the purely acoustic space.

After that, I have the framework for a piece that I was originally going to be make as a standalone digital audio piece that I’m now inclined to make a work for solo cello and interactive electronics, specifically for my colleague Elise who plays with me as a part of Versipel New Music. I originally wanted to do that next year, but given the scale of the wind ensemble piece, i’m now thinking that I’ll have to put that off until the fall of 2020 or the spring of 2021. I’ve also been having some initial talks with a dancer/choreographer to maybe do some collaborative work with her and interactive video. That has no timeline, but given that I would have to spend time learning how to use Jitter, I imagine that that would have to be 2021 or later.

The other thing that I’m thinking about is taking the concepts that I’ve put into Minkowski and turning it into a series of pieces – using similar interactive and creative concepts and some of the same Max work for other instruments in the same way as Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece series or Berlioz’s Sequenza series. It would be a lot of fun to write a Minkowski for percussion and another one for clarinet. We’ll see what happens as I let this piece germinate and start to market it. If people want to play it and it’s received well, then it will definitely happen.

Some of the Max programming mechanics that I’ve done for this work have been put into my Kaizen YouTube series, and I’ll be posting up at least one more video that talks about it in the near future. For now, below is the most recent that talks about my custom interactive cue engine.

That led to me creating my first real video editing project that i eventually titled Chain Factor Chaos:

It’s a pretty rough final product execution wise, and conceptually i don’t like what I did with the first big “section” anymore (the first 3’40”), but I’m still incredibly happy with the rest of it leading to the recap transition (3’40”-9’00″ish). A part of me would love to take a second crack at it given the sort of video editing chops I have now, but a) i don’t know that I still have access to the source video anymore, and b) if it came down to it i’d rather do something new from scratch than re-hash an old project.

In any case, when I posted my blog entry that talked about the project, Frank Lantz happened to come across it and commented on it saying how much he liked it. I remember feeling very touched (and, truth be told, a little overwhelmed) that he took the time to write to me. I wrote him an email to say “you’re welcome”, and we had a brief email exchange where he gave me more nice words about it. After that exchange, that was that.

Fast forward eight years later to yesterday.

Recently, a new browser game called Universal Paperclips has made the viral rounds. It’s what some people classify as an “idler”, and it’s a game type i’ve enjoyed playing in the past, so when my brother shared it with me, I said, “sure, i’ll give it a shot.” After I finally finished the game (which ended up taking a few days), there was an end credit line that said, “(c) 2017 by Frank Lantz”.

And i was like, “i recognize that name… oh! It’s the Chain Factor guy!” It took me a moment, but even after eight years I remembered who he was, the interactions we exchanged. So i found him on twitter, and said, “hey, i just finished your new game, remember me?” and he tweeted me back and said, “Of course!”, said he still found the video amazing, and it was nice to reconnect. I told him that his game was great and that I was going to play it as part of a video game marathon for charity, and he tweeted a link to my charity page and also gave me a donation.

Such a random eight-years-apart reconnection made with a damned awesome guy. I might start using twitter more often because it definitely shouldn’t be another eight years before we interact again.

Some background first:

This is my BufferRecord patch:

It’s pretty straightforward – you give a command for what buffer you want to record into, it activates the recording and sets a timer to track the length of time recorded. When you’re done recording, it turns off the Record function and stores the length in ms into a list that it can then use for reference for looped playback (because otherwise it would loop the whole buffer which i’ve set at a default for 20s).

This is my Loop patch:

There’s a lot of small things going on there, but the relevant point to this entry is that the actual engine for playback is going through that [poly~] object. [Poly~] is a way to “clone” a subpatch with multiple instances without actually copy/pasting those individual instances which necessitates routing signals to those individual instances via cumbersome gates and switches. Everything is instead set by a single [poly`] object that has a definable number of “voices” that can be dealt with all at once or individually. In this patch I have 16 different voices. When a loop is activated, a counter iterates to the next [poly~] voice and then all of the loop info is assigned to that voice – it iterates to one voice higher in number to the one that was last used, so if the last voice used was 8, the next loop activation chooses voice 9.

Here’s the patch that exists inside of the [poly~] object: 

The [groove~] object is what actually plays the loop. I send in the buffer name to loop (which replaces the default i created “Buffer1”) as well as all of the variables of loop start/end time and speed.

The problem is: since i’m not personally tracking which [poly~] voice is being used for an individual loop (because i just have the counter iterating to the next available voice), I needed to find an alternate way to find a specific loop within a voice instance so i could end just that specific loop as needed. I decided to use the Buffer name (in this instance “1-01”) as a means of doing that, so if i send the command [LoopEnd 1-01], it would find the [poly~] voice that’s looping 1-01 by name and then turn it off. Except what if I want to run multiple voices with the same buffer simultaneously and I only want to turn off some of those voices later? Sending the command [LoopEnd 1-01] would turn off all voices that hold a buffer named 1-01 at once with no ability to deal with that partially.

There’s a few different ways to address this. The quick and dirty method is to take any instance in which i want the same buffer materials looped and write that material into multiple buffers. That way, voices in the [poly~] will never have duplicate names. It’s sloppy and would require a ton of extra CPU buffer depending on how many copies of a single buffer i would want to create.

A more programmatically clean but inflexible way is to identify the loops by poly voice only with no concern for what’s there. That could create some potential problems down the road if, say, one Record Buffer fails to trigger or the counter iterates wrong or something and now sample 1 is not located in voice 1 where it’s supposed to be and i accidentally activate or cut the wrong loop.

The most airtight but most difficult to program way is to somehow link the name of the sample with either the voice it’s connected to or its simultaneous iteration number and then somehow program LoopEnds to know which voice each simultaneous iteration is connected to even if that voice is different every performance. As i type this out, I may have a strategy to address this, but I still need to work out some of the details in my head to make sure it will work. If it doesn’t, i’ll probably go quick and dirty and hope that my laptop can handle the CPU load that would be necessary. We’ll see what happens.

First, one of my marching band students has asked me to write a piece for his senior trumpet recital. After a brief discussion about ideas, I decided to write it as an interactive piece using Max, which has gotten me down the path of re-learning and doing a lot of Max programming (because apparently I can’t make things easy for myself even if i tried). I’m not as familiar with MSP as I should be, but hopefully this will graduate me from beginner to competent amateur.

Right now I’m conceiving of the piece as being done in four movements, all of which play with a different concept of time. The first movement will be about the trumpet playing some passages that will then get echoed back and potentially manipulated, representing the trumpet playing from the “past” being used with current material. The second movement will be about the trumpet playing passages that has chordal movement in live unison, representing the trumpet playing from the “present” being used with the current material. The third movement will be about the trumpet playing passages that it hears from Max first, representing the idea that those passages are grabbing trumpet playing from “future” passages. The fourth movement will pull from all of those concepts into a single movement that is loosely based on the concept of spacetime.

The beginning stages of this is mostly programming Max patches that can deal with these various mechanics. I’m trying to figure out the best way to get the trumpet signal into Max, easily identify its pitch, account for tuning errors, different input/output gains and levels, and the like. Once I create that groundwork, I’ll deal with tools for the actual music. The patch for Movement 2 is going to be a modified version of an external patch already built by ICST, so that’ll also probably be what I compose first.

Second, I need to write a piece for nienteForte this year, and if all goes according to plan, that will be for the TALEA ensemble. A lot will depend on exactly what members of TALEA will be a part of the festival, but if all goes according to plan, the piece will also include some basic Max programming (but much more simple as it will be MIDI only and I can do that in my sleep). The piece is going to be based on a Dali painting that i love, with the idea that the ensemble is going to be split into two distinct tonal groups – one that uses equal-temperament and another that uses a “parallel” microtonal equal-temperament that phases in and out as controlled by Max and a MIDI piano. The idea I have right now is to put the responsibility of the parallel tuning on string instruments with the idea that it’s easier for them to constantly microtune than it is for wind instruments.

We’ll see how all of this shakes down; the current goal is to get the Max programming structure of the trumpet piece done in the next few weeks so that I can start writing the actual music in July. My progress on that will be somewhat contingent on Life getting in the way, which is going wonderfully ballistic right now with house hunting with the girlfriend, staying on top of TUMB stuff, etc.