recent

listening

• Wuorinen — all I can find on you tube
• Beethoven — late string quartets recorded by Tackacs

reading

• finished Wallace’s Infinite Jest a few months ago
• currently Nabokov’s Pale Fire

watching

• Jodorowsky’s El Topo
• Brakhage selections from the Criterion set
• My Dinner with Andre
• Fantastic Mr. Fox

not Quite Studie II

I did this a while ago and just remembered this morning. I was doing a little presentation on using Patterns in SuperCollider and thought I might be able to make a little mock Studie II with one pattern. It’s definitely nothing as wonderful as Stockhausen’s piece, but I think it’s humorously close.

Here’s the real deal: Stockhausen’s Studie II

Here’s my code:


(
SynthDef(\notQuiteStudieII,
{
arg freq = 440, amp = 0.5, mults = #[1, 1, 1, 1, 1], sustain = 1;
var sound, filt, mix, env, attack, decay;
sound = Formlet.ar(WhiteNoise.ar(0.1), freq*mults, 0.01, 0.05);
mix = Mix(sound);
attack = Rand(0.01, 0.99) * sustain; //attack.poll;
decay = sustain - attack;
env = EnvGen.ar(Env([0, amp, 0], [attack, decay], \lin), levelScale: 0.5, doneAction: 2);
Out.ar(0, FreeVerb.ar(mix, 0.9, 0.9, 0.1) * env ! 2 )
}
).memStore;
)


(
Pbind(
\instrument, \notQuiteStudieII,
\freq, Pwrand([Pwhite(100.0, 1000.0, 1), \rest], [4, 1].normalizeSum, inf),
\mults, Pif( Pkey(\freq) < 500.0,
Pfunc( { [ {rrand(0.5, 0.6) } ! 5 ] } ),
Pfunc( { [ {rrand(0.5, 7.6) } ! 4 ++ 1 ] } ),
Pfunc( { [ {rrand(0.5, 8.0) } ! 4 ++ 1 ] } )
),
\dur, Pif( Pkey(\freq) < 650.0, Pwhite(0.1, 0.8), Pwhite(0.5, 1.9), 1),
\legato, Pif( Pkey(\freq) < 375.0, Pwhite(0.5, 1.2), Pwhite(0.9, 1.9), 1),
\amp, Pwhite(0.1, 0.5)
).play;
)


coincidence or friendly cosmos?

I drive from Hillcrest in San Diego to Mission Viejo on Fridays to teach some bass lessons. Today’s drive was approximately 12 seconds shy of John Eliot Gardiner’s recordings of Beethoven’s 3rd and 4th Symphonies combined.

There’s something very satisfying about that.

YouTube

I’m about 400 videos behind the times, but this is an amazing youtube channel.

LFA Photos

The Lucerne Festival Academy put up some really nice photos of performances from the festival here.