Experimental Music & Sound

The Edges of Objects

We spend our lives grazing the edges of objects, using our senses to fumble our way through the world. Life changes shape as it comes into focus. What feels like a blob will take form, gain structure, but then, what made sense will soon fall apart. To close out 2020, which will be forever known as a pandemic year, I put together this little audio-visual experiment.

It's a chance to take a deep breath or maybe a few. I made the short melodic song entirely on a modular synthesizer (patch notes below), in the vein of Erik Satie's "Furniture Music" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furnitu...) and following Brian Eno's definition of Ambient Music. It is intended for any level of listening. Turn it on in the background. Watch it intently for a little while. Put it on repeat, quietly, while you do something else.

On the more technical side, this rather simple patch includes two analog oscillators (Make Noise STO) going through low pass gates (Optomix), quad peak low pass filter (QPAS) and a digital delay (Mimeophon). The melody is played as a hocket (using an analog shift register) in which the two voices are alternating on the notes of a melody with an uneven length (15 steps). A generous amount of randomness introduces unexpected and generative changes to the sounds (Wogglebug, Sloths, and Marbles). Some granular synthesis (Clouds/Monsoon) offers crackling vinyl-record-like sounds for a bit of additional soundscape.

The accompanying visuals are made with a lava lamp, an analog oscilloscope, and the feedback lighting of the Eurorack modules. Ultimately inspired by the work of Oskar Fischinger (https://youtu.be/6Xc4g00FFLk?t=77), whose early modernist animations played with optics and sound, I created this as a quick experiment to see what I could make in a single evening. I hope you enjoy it.