Ostracon Debut Excerpt: Photon Coercion

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Here’s an excerpt of the second track from the upcoming Ostracon debut album, Unauthorized Modifications. This track is titled Photon Coercion. The album consists of drumming by Graham O’Brien and electronic sound that I produced using GMS, or Gestural Music Sequencer. GMS is Open Source software I developed that converts video signals into musical phrases. A video signal is analysed in real-time and then MIDI notes are produced based on brightness tracking and adjustable probability distribution algorithms.

This excerpt, in addition to looped phrases from GMS, includes a lead melodic voice that I played on the touch based synthesizer, Bebot. I fell in love with the expressive way you can bend notes independently on up to five voices (an impossibility on most conventional keyboards – unless you have one of these) using Bebot.

Photon Coercion (excerpt)

GrainMachine Release and Example Sample

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Recently I have been working hard on getting my Max for Live instrument, GrainMachine, ready for release. It’s just about ready to go. I can’t name a date just yet, but I can tell you that it will be available as a free download. Here’s an example sound that I created with the instrument to go along with an example Live set I’ll be including with the release.

GrainMachine Example Sample

Arpeggiated Polyphonic Subharmonics

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Here’s another example of manually applying subharmonic frequencies to a musical phrase. I used the Bitstream 3X arpeggiator to drive the Roland MKS-80 then duplicated the track. On the second track I dropped the frequency by twelve semi-tones and ran it through a low-pass filter effectively eliminating upper harmonics and creating subharmonic frequencies based on the original piece. Although this technique sounds good, it’s not exactly practical, so soon I repeat the experiments with some processors that are designed specifically to do this.

Arpeggiated Poly Subs

What Do You Use to Generate Subharmonic Frequencies?

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Played these chords on the Super Jupiter the same day I recorded the last sound. As is my habit, I programmed the patch without saving it, so this will be a one off microtrack unless I decide to reverse engineer the sound for one reason or another. Again, I decided to apply the same technique to add the bass frequencies as I did before (adding it to another layer, dropping the pitch an octave, and running it through a low pass filter). Out of curiosity, what processors do you use to create subharmonic frequencies in your work? Do you use hardware or software? What in your opinion are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Polyphonic Synth with Subs (Part 2)