Everything In Its Own Place (disquiet0225-serialcomposition) by Nate Trier

My approach to graphic scores is to try to identify every possible visual aspect and then "map" it to a corresponding musical parameter. At the same time, I tried to keep in the spirit of this week's instructions to "sightread" this score by keeping my performance live, loose, and imperfect. I jotted down some notes on what the different aspects of the score would correlate to in the music, and then I just sat down and recorded it.

To me, the horizontal lines represented a series of andante eighth notes. The blank space between the figures indicated "silence," which meant the synth would not play and the static would emerge from the background (I decided to keep playing the notes and then go back and mute them later by drawing an volume envelope in Ableton).

Vertical lines would mean several notes played it once in a chord or cluster. The hollow squares and rectangles "hinted" at notes (extremely staccato).

Red meant something dramatic, so I decided to make that fortissimo playing paired with TAL's Bitcrusher VST.

Moving down to the next line transposed everything down a half step or whole step (depending on what was next in the major scale).

As each line moves from left to right, a very subtle EQ cut sweeps from the lowest frequencies to the highest.

Now let me tell you ALL ABOUT the background static! The background static is a mix of white noise panned all the way to the left and brown noise panned all the way to the rigth (since the background color is kind of a light brown or beige - get it?). That established a nice "palette" but it was a little dull, so I decided to play with it. So I put a gate on the white noise that was triggered by the brown noise (which had much more dynamic variety). Then I put a vocoder on the brown noise that used the white noise as a carrier. At this point I had a nice little feedback loop going on between the two sources of audio. I didn't completely know what I had done but it sounded cool so I decided to run with it. Finally, I sent both of those to another channel and put a gate on THAT channel keyed to the synthesizer's audio. So, basically, whenever the synthesizer played, the blended static would quiet down until the keyboard was done. All in all this generated some really interesting background rhythms that felt very organic. It feels like the static and the melody are interacting, even though there's nothing really built into the system to make that happen!

All in all, Prati's variations on the single dash end up feeling very musical. There are variations that linger and establish a different "place." The "theme" returns sometimes, but altered. We end in a different place than we started - and isn't that the goal?

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More on this 225th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Sight read a late-1940s painting by Argentine artist Lidy Prati as a graphically notated score”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0225/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

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Image originally posted (and viewable in larger scale) at

http://blakegopnik.com/post/142806762364