On Modular Purism and Sozialrealismus

Among practitioners of modular synthesis, there is today a widespread reverence for the pure modular, where the modular shines on its own as the single sound source, preferably recorded in one take and with minimal post-processing. In improvised music this kind of purism may make sense, but modulars are often used in other ways, e.g. driven by sequencers or set up as a self-generating system more or less nudged in the right direction by the modularist.

Playing live in a concert, overdubs or edits are obviously not a part of the game. Perhaps that spontaneous flow of live performance is taken as the ideal form that even home studio recordings should mimic.

This ideal of purity often serves as an excuse for acquiring a voluminous modular system. Even more so if one wants to achieve full polyphony. However, there is so much to gain from multi-tracking and editing that it is a wonder why anyone with a modular should refuse to deal with that part.

The pieces on the album SOZIALREALISMUS are collages and juxtapositions of a variety of sources. All pieces are centered around recordings of a eurorack modular, often accompanied by field recordings.

In some pieces the electronic sounds were played through loudspeakers placed on the resonating bodies of acoustic instruments and then recorded again. Recordings have been cut up and spliced together in new constellations.

Although the blinking lights and the mess of patch cords of a modular projects an image of complicated machinery leading its autonomous electric life, another aesthetic is possible even in the realm of modular music, an aesthetic of handicraft, allowing the imperfections of improvisation. The included drawings that come with the digital album and the linoleum print cover on the cassette hint in that direction.

Linoleum print © Holopainen. Makes for an interesting stereo image as well.

There has always been a focus on technique and gear in the electronic music community. When modulars are becoming more common, their ability to provoke curiosity may dwindle if the music made with them fails to convince the listeners.

Golomb Rulers and Ugly Music

A Golomb ruler has marks on it for measuring distances, but unlike ordinary rulers it has a smaller number of irregularly spaced marks that still allow for measuring a large number of distances. The marks are at integer multiples of some arbitrary unit. A regular ruler of six units length will have marks at 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, and it will be possible to measure each distance from 1 to 6 units. A Golomb ruler of length six could have marks at 0, 1, 4 and 6.

Each distance from 1 to 6 can be found between pairs of marks on this ruler. A Golomb ruler that has this nice property that each distance from 1 to the length of the ruler can be measured with it is called a perfect Golomb ruler. Unfortunately, there is a theorem that states that there are no perfect Golomb rulers with more than four marks.

Sidon sets are subsets of the natural numbers {1, 2, ..., n} such that the sums of any pair of the numbers in the set are all different. It turns out that Sidon sets are equivalent to Golomb rulers. The proof must have been one of the lowest hanging fruits ever of mathematics.

An interesting property of Golomb rulers is that, in a sense, they are maximally irregular. Toussaint used them to test a theory of rhythmic complexity precisely because of their irregularity, which is something that sets them apart from more commonly encountered musical rhythms.

There is a two-dimensional counterpart to Golomb rulers which was used to compose a piano piece that, allegedly, contains no repetition and is therefore the ugliest kind of music its creator could think of.

Contrary to what Scott Rickard says in this video, there are musical patterns in this piece. Evidently they did not consider octave equivalence, so there is a striking passage of ascending octaves and hence pitch class repetition.

At first hearing, the "ugly" piece may sound like a typical 1950's serialist piece, but it has some characteristic features such as its sequence of single notes and its sempre forte articulation. Successful serialist pieces would be much more varied in texture.

The (claimed) absence of patterns in the piece is more extreme than would be a random sequence of notes. If notes had been drawn randomly from a uniform distribution, there is some probability of immediate repetition of notes as well as of repeated sequences of intervals. When someone tries to improvise a sequence of random numbers, say, just the numbers 0, 1, they would typically exaggerate the occurrences of changes and generate too little repetition. True randomness is more orderly than our human conception of it. In that sense the "ugly" piece agrees with our idea of randomness more than would an actually random sequence of notes.

When using Golomb rulers for rhythm generation, it may be practical to repeat the pattern instead of extending a Golomb ruler to the length of the entire piece. In the case of repetition the pattern occurs cyclically, so the definition of the ruler should change accordingly. Now we have a circular Golomb ruler (perhaps better known as a cyclic difference set) where the marks are put on a circle, and distances are measured along the circumference of the circle.

Although the concept of a Golomb ruler is easy for anyone to grasp, some generalization and a little further digging leads into the frontiers of mathematic knowledge with unanswered questions still to solve. 

And, of course, the Golomb rulers make excellent raw material for quirky music.

Reptilian Revolution

Almost unquantized music.

Q: Is this a concept album?
A: Yes. Its subject matter is not only derived from those entertaining kooks who see shapeshifting reptilians on u-tube videos with their very own eyes, hence they must exist; there are also references to more serious topics such as the unhealthy state of affairs alluded to in this previous post.

Programming for algorithmic composition

Computer programming is an essential prerequisite for musical composition. Imagine if that were the case. Of course it is not, any more than composition is necessary for programming. However, in algorithmic composition you do not get very far without recourse to computer programming, and for composers to learn programming, algorithmic composition is the best way to get started. 

Writing a program that outputs a specific composition is very different from programming for the general needs of some other user, which is what professional programmers do. Since no assumptions about the interaction with some unknown user have to be made, it should be much easier. Programming in algorithmic composition is nothing other than a particular way of composing, a method that inserts a layer of formalisation between the composer and the music. Algorithmic composition is a wonderful opportunity to investigate ideas, to learn about models and simulations, to map data to sound.

Generative music, which is not necessarily synonymous with algorithmic composition, is often concerned with making long pieces or a set of pieces that may be created on demand. The forthcoming album Signals & Systems is filled to the brim with algorithmic compositions, and the source code for a program that outputs variants on one of the pieces is now available.

Manifesto for self-generating patches

Ideas for the implementation of autonomous instruments in analog modular synths (v. 0.2)

The following guidelines are not meant as aesthetic value judgements or prescriptions as to what people should do with their modulars — as always, do what you want! The purpose is to propose some principles for the exploration of a limited class of patches and a particular mode of using the modular as an instrument.

Self-generating patches are those which, when left running without manual interference, produce complex and varied musical patterns. Usually, the results will be more or less unpredictable. In this class of patches, there are no limitations as to what modules to use and how to connect them, except that one should not change the patch or touch any knobs after the patch has been set up to run. An initial phase of testing and tweaking is of course allowed, but if preparing a recording as documentation of the self-generating patch, it should just run uninterrupted on its own.

A stricter version of the same concept is to try to make a deterministic autonomous system in which there is no source of modulation (such as LFOs or sequencers) that is not itself modulated by other sources. In consequence, the patch has to be a feedback system.

The patch may be regarded as a network with modules as the nodes and patch cords as the links. Specifically, it is a bidirectional graph, because modules usually have both inputs and outputs. (The requirement that there be no source of modulation which itself is not modulated by other modules implies that, e.g., noise modules or LFOs without any input are not allowed.) Thus, in the graph corresponding to the patch, each node that belongs to the graph must have at least one incomming link and at least one outgoing link. The entire patch must be interconnected in the sense that one can follow the patch cords from any module through intervening modules to any other module that belongs to the patch.


Criterion of elegance:
The smaller the number of modules and patch cords used, the more elegant the patch is. (Caveat: modules are not straightforwardly comparable. There are small and simple modules with restricted possibilities, and modules with lots of features that may correspond to using several simpler modules.)

Aesthetic judgement:
Why not organize competitions where the audience may vote for their favourite patches, or perhaps let a panel of experts decide.

Standards of documentation:
Make a high quality audio recording with no post processing other than possibly volume adjustment. Video recordings and/or photos of the patch are welcome, but a detailed diagram explaining the patch and settings of all knobs and switches involved should be submitted. The diagram should provide all the information necessary to reconstruct the patch.

Criterion of robustness:
Try to reconstruct the patch with some modules replaced by equivalent ones. Swap one oscillator for another one, use a different filter or VCA and try to get a similar sound. Also try small adjustments of knobs and see whether it affects the sound in a radical way. The more robust a patch is, the easier it should be for other modular enthusiasts to recreate a similar patch on their system.

Criteria of objective complexity:
The patch is supposed to generate complex, evolving sounds, not just a static drone or a steady noise. Define your own musical complexity signal descriptor and apply it to the signal. Or use one of the existing complexity measures.

Dissemination:
Spread your results and let us know about your amazing patch!

Who cares if they listen?

No, it wasn't Milton Babbitt who coined the title of that notorious essay, but it stuck. And, by the way, it was "Who cares if you listen?". Serialism, as Babbitt alludes to, employs a tonal vocabulary "more efficient" than that of past tonal music. Each note-event is precisely determined by its pitch class, register, dynamic, duration and timbre. In that sense, the music has a higher information density and the slightest deviation from the prescribed values is structurally different, not just an expressive coloration. Such music inevitably poses high demands on the performer, as well as on the listener. (Critical remarks could be inserted here, but I'm not going to.) Similarly to how recent advances in mathematics or physics can be understood only by a handful of specialists, there is an advanced music that we should not expect to be immediately accessible to everyone. For such an elitist endeavor to have a chance of survival at all, Babbitt suggests that research in musical composition should take its refuge in universities. Indeed, in 20th century America that was where serialist composers were to be found.

The recent emergence of artistic research at universities and academies is really not much different from what Babbitt was pleading for. Artistic research is awkwardly situated between theorizing and plain artistic practice as it used to be before everyone had to write long manifestos. But more about that on another occasion, perhaps.

In a more dadaist spirit, there is this new release out now on bandcamp, also titled Who cares if they listen.

In these days there are enough reasons to care if they listen (yes they do, but not wittingly) and to worry about its consequences, as discussed in a previous post.

Limited edition

When does it make sense to publish something on the internet, let's say a recording, as though it were a limited edition? A de facto limitation in the number of downloads is not impossible to achieve if the item is made to drown in the information deluge and then taken off-line as soon as it has been downloaded some specified number of times. Then of course one cannot guarantee that it will never be uploaded again, although that can be made a bit awkward by having very large files.

Does this strategy really work if the internet never forgets? (The Wayback Machine takes care of that, although they do not necessarily save all audio that floats around out there. Can we hope that some unnamed data centre in Utah or elsewhere stores it for us? Maybe, if you send it as an email attachment.) Usually people do their best to boost the number of views and fight hard for their page ranks. Doing the opposite clearly has its merits if the analog of a limited edition is the goal. Obviously, the idea of limited edition is tied to physical media, to something people can hold in their hands, so a digital file will not easily do as a replacement. The point of limited editions is exactly to make it clear that the resource is scarce, the object you are holding in your hands is a collectors item.

[announcement]

Thinking along these lines, I have published the two hour apocryphal piece Teem Work, which I intend to replace with something else before it has become too widespread. Although it can be downloaded, the following reasons speak against it.

• The composition is merely a sketch. 
• It will occupy more space on your hard disk than strictly necessary. 
• It will steal two hours of your precious time. You'll never get them back.

It should be added that Teem Work features synthesis by cross-coupled feedback FM as described in a previous post.

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Update (December 2015):

A remixed edition is now available as a digital album. Still it will steal two hours of your time, precious or not.