jpff at codemist.co.uk
John ffitch was definitely born after WWII, in that part of the United Kingdom which is God’s own county, certainly educated at an East Anglian university in the sixties, and despite his long hair and lengthening beard, and the uncertain spelling of his name, was never a hippie. His entire professional career has been as an academic mathematician/computer scientist, and for most of that time he has been in Mathematical Sciences at Bath, where he holds the Chair of Software Engineering, a subject about which he knows little. His main interests have been in Relativity, Planetary Astronomy, Computer Algebra and LISP, but he has been known to dabble widely, for example in tank warfare, Latin poetry, Arabic linguistics, compilers, and company management, all with some lack of success. Strangely enough he won the Adams Prize for Mathematics a quarter of a century ago, but not much since. Hobbies include maintaining Csound, supervising research students, receiving and losing e-mail, and complaining about the Web.
If I could just convey the beauty of mathematics….
Csound, C
Mapping chaotic oscillators to different pitch systems and sounds.
License: Creative Commons: Attribution-NoDerivs
#1: Prelude; Henon; Gruneberg, Distance, Prelude
The initial idea from which this work spread was a short sequence of notes taken from a mapping of the Henon (chaos) differential equation onto pitch and duration. Certain themes in it suggested to me a piece, which developed into the current manifestation, although it has changed a great deal. The title is an echo of the well known quotation from Thoreau and the repetitive canon like structure of this differential equation. The work is in three movements, the second and third played without a break, with an introductory and closing fanfare. The first movement, the longest, is subtitled Henon, and is a slow statement of the main musical material, derived from the Henon equation. It is played mainly on a marimba-like instrument, with injections from other timbres, triggered by certain events, and taking material from the Torus chaos function. An arbitrary limit of 500 events was chosen, the 500th event being marked by a different sound. The second movement was conceived on a mountain in Austria called Gruneberg, above the town of Gmunden, which I climbed on a rainy day in September, while listening to some Xenakis on a walkman. The score is actually the same events as the first movement, but the instruments are drums, played at about twice the speed, with much stereo modifications, and there are other unstable motions of timbre. The same score is used for the last movement, but the introduction of glissandi changes the mood to a distant memory of Gruneberg. The inspiration was a distant view of hills, both from Gruneberg and from my house. It is quieter, and I hope more reflective. For the technically minded, the pitches are all taken from an 100ET scale. The piece was realised in a mixture of ANSI C and CSound. The work took about 15 months to write, and lasts about 7 minutes.
#2: Stalactite
Sitting in Detroit Airport (Wright Field) waiting for a flight home from ICMC I found a power point and started an investigation of the 88CET scale. No one (else) liked the noise I produced (Wright Field Fast Forward to Texas) so it was refined to this work. It used Lorentz equation and the interesting scale, and a reverb from Stockholm underground.
#3: For Connie
Connie plays Cage and other works locally. This is a mapping of Lorentz equation to what should be playable by a human.
#4: Boundless Space
“O God
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” said Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play. In this piece all the instruments are taken from Boulanger’s “Trapped in Convert”, and they are played in the same order and proportions as he uses in Trapped. However the timing, pitches, and durations and other parameters are chosen by reference to the Henon (chaotic) equation, so they go round, never quite repeating themselves; except for two short quotations from Trapped at the start and after about 200seconds, the repetitions of the Henon equation dominate. A short, three note motif emerges from the process and dominates the closing moments. Are we really in boundless space or just trapped in a nutshell? The piece was algorithmically generated using a C program to create a Csound score. The algorithm was developed and modified, partly with reference to Trapped and the use of instruments there, and partly on composer’s choice. Composed in September-November 2002
#5: Charles de Nuit
A night near a motorway. The original sample was recorded at about 4am, and the treatment uses Henon equation to drive resonant filters.
tags: artist audio mp3 algorithmic csound