The past two weeks have been good for focusing a bit, and thinking about which project ideas would be possible given my workload for the other courses. I’m still keeping track of all my ideas for the future though.
Researching hypnotic experiences for week 3’s assignment was incredibly useful for helping me to realise I’d like to explore that adjective, at least for one of my projects. I’d subconsciously made it part of my aesthetic for one of my musical projects, so the groundwork has been somewhat laid already. It’ll definitely benefit from research into the psychological effects of repetitive auditory and visual patterns.
At the end of week 2 I produced this from my experiments with Emission Control:
The downside of Emission Control is that the audio is mono only, so I had to do some processing in Reaper—shifting the right channel forward in the sequence by a few “beats”. I actually don’t mind the effect though, as the audio appears to sweep from left to right, which is a little hypnotic in itself. Perhaps I could have it alternate between which channel is behind/in front, or expand it to a 5.1 experience and have it sweep in circles, arcs, or other patterns—thus providing further opportunities for corresponding visual events. It’s certainly a worthy experiment that I’ll likely add to for the final project, whether it is for the Capitol Theatre lighting system, or the 9.1.36 lighting system.
As I was speaking to a classmate on Thursday about the potential of the metal genre to be hypnotic, I was reminded of a project I started but haven’t finished yet; an album of unrelenting, single riff pieces that exploit the stamina of the performers. Here is one example from that project:
Obviously at this point, the drums are programmed, so the stamina exploitation comes from my performance of the guitars. It was unbelievably difficult to keep the playing consistent for the seven minutes of the original piece. From that perspective, the brutal adjective could apply, but I also think it’s quite hypnotic, especially if using a somewhat ambiguous rhythm structure which could be interpreted as in several different time signatures, depending on the context (not so much in this piece). It’s sneaking its way into the arc of my project, and I’d love to play with the potential perspective and intensity shift that would result from a smooth blend between staccato, electronic sounds and the more fluid, open riffs of the metal track.
My idea for this kind of repetitive, hypnotic metal came not only from the Liturgy piece I shared last week, but from the section from 6:47–7:07 in Meshuggah’s I:
Unevenly repeating rhythms across the guitar riffs against the higher time signature structure is a key characteristic of Meshuggah’s sound, but the above passage is particularly entrancing for its use of much shorter phrases—the juxtaposition between the hihat and snare pulses provide an ambiguous rhythmic perspective and makes the repeating phrase quite hypnotic.
Further study into rhythmic ambiguity led me to some articles on polyrhythms, notably Martim Galvao’s thesis Metric Interplay: A Case Study In Polymeter, Polyrhythm, And Polytempo; and the section describing Steve Reich’s piece Drumming:
The documentation of the techniques Reich used in Drumming (from his own essay “Writings on Music”) describes them as such:
- the process of gradually substituting beats for rests (or rests for beats);
- the gradual changing of timbre while rhythm and pitch remain constant;
- the simultaneous combination of instruments of different timbre and
- the use of the human voice to become part of the music ensemble by imitating the exact sound of the instruments.
A lot of these can apply to my experiments so far, and planned work for my hypnotising project; even analogies such as using time stretching instead of phasing / gradually changing timbre, or imitating acoustic properties using synthesis.
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The one day we were allowed on to campus last week was quite enjoyable and inspiring. The Capitol Theatre is incredibly majestic, and viewing some of the work that previous students had created has given me some ideas about how to use the lighting system to my advantage, beyond simple Ryoji Ikeda-style minimalist tones and flashing lights. Having said that though, I think I will stick to a strict colour palette, even using mostly white, perhaps “smeared” with my brand colours of red and teal to give the impression that the lights are blurring, or leaking. In addition, I am aware of the possibility that people will get bored watching the same thing over and over, even in the context of a hypnotic work, and as such it would make sense to develop an arc for my piece, perhaps even before commencing work on the finer details.
The demonstration in 9.1.36 was more impressive than I was expecting. I’m very much interested in the strobing and tilt properties of a few lights, as well as the ability to express movement through individually addressing the LEDs in the ceiling. If I had time, I’d love to build a simulated version that runs in a browser and accepts the kind of MIDI signals required to control the DMXIS software, in order to get a loose idea of how a sequence will look in the space. It does open some interesting possibilities for live, or generative control, as manual sequencing might be quite time-consuming unless controlling it on a higher, macro level.
Pierre Proske’s demonstration in the black box was possibly even more inspiring, and following on from my brief chat with him in person and via email over the past couple of days, I’m motivated to at least attempt some kind of external communication from my browser-based works, but more on that later. Proske seems to be doing all of the things I want to do, in that he’s shifting some of the creative coding paradigms into physical spaces, with a generative/algorithmic approach to sequencing light and sound. Even though I’m in my relative infancy when it comes to contextualising / developing my creative practice to academic levels, it’s interactions like this that make me feel like I’m among my people.
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I’ve spoken to several people about fitting my browser-based works into a project for this semester. I’m still undecided about which adjective to aim for, but the discussions have so far been useful for determining what counts as a heightened experience—the possibility of engagement even if accessing a work through a small browser window is something I will be exploring, for sure, and have touched on with my existing works, such as Bounce.
As mentioned earlier, there is the potential to use WebMIDI to extend the browser-based projects into physical spaces, with the first extensions coming to mind being lighting (e.g. 9.1.36) or the electromechanical percussion setup I’ve been developing:
I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to modify pieces like Bounce or Dungeon to allow for connection to an external Teensy-based box with eight or so solenoid outputs, striking various improvised percussion objects. As demonstrated above, I already have part of the setup working, I just need to extend it somewhat (mostly, by developing my own MIDI trigger solution rather than using the drum machine in the above example).