JAMES WYNESS
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The Articulate Particulator (part 2)

20/8/2022

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(Disclaimer: my maxpatches look horrible but they work).

This is fair to middling technical but I've made it as straightforward as I can.

The first image below shows one of four stereo tracks for the 8-channel Particulate Articulator that I've been writing about. The other three tracks are almost duplicates (I left them out for clarity) except that tracks 2 and 4 have a tape delay option (with sliders that I can assign to a small korg controller) cobbled together from patches I found online. I don't use the tape delay much except occasionally for radio works because too much delay is a bit obvious for my tastes. Besides I'm using good quality outboard pedal effects and  I have also have Revox that does tape delay properly. The patch looks just about acceptable in the picture but all four tracks together is a bird's nest.

Some of the text in the objects I don't understand. The text is either there as part of Max's functions or I put it there and can't remember why. The stray text is pure indolence on my behalf.  Basically I don't want to change anything I don't understand because the patch works and because I know how to change values for the bits I want to tweak. Maybe I should learn how to streamline the patch. Below you'll find the presentation view which is quite tidy. Maybe this is how it goes - messy under the hood and a slick looking superstructure.

I begin by loading in folders of sounds to each of the four tracks. At the moment, for my new label and for live work, I'm working with eight sounds per folder because I think things start to sound tight with a restricted group of sounds (as in my compositions). These folders can be changed on the fly. Various random metronomes decide when the files are selected so nothing changes regularly. The looper module chops up the audio files into different sizes, starting and finishing in different places. Because of the way I've set it up nothing comes out sounding like a looper's been at it. I also have a time-stretcher object (which stretches between two values, randomised, both up and down), though I've begun setting this to operate between values close to 1.0 because I'm happy with the work on the files beforehand and also anything with vocal sounds or certain instruments sounds odd. The timestretcher worked very well in some radio pieces I made in the past. There are other objects that I put in there to try to stop clicks resulting from the constant chopping and changing that goes on. I've forgotten how they work. I think they help a bit but not totally so if anyone knows how to create a tiny fade in/out once the files come out of the looper object I'd be grateful for tips.

I should point out that I have different patches for 1'  2', 3' and 5' files. I also modified patches for combinations, eg I can have a patch with tracks et to: 1', 2', 2' 5'. Why? Because the 1' files are more gestural and more rapidly articulated than the 5' files which tend to be more textural, both in the kinds of sounds I've selected and the way they play longer. Each patch has started to develop a unique 'character' that I'm still learning to work with.

The eight channels (four stereo channels) are fed from computer to an RME Fireface, then to the desk where I mix live and add outboard effects on the two auxiliaries.

Although I took some time to learn Max from scratch and to eventually design and build this digital instrument (I'll come to the 'why'  in the third and final blog post), the hard work went in over years, decades even. Everything I've ever learned and understood about sound and music, about composition, has gone into this ostensibly simple task of chopping up recordings into different lengths. Tailoring the sounds that go into the folders, cataloguing, establishing taxonomies, working out what sound goes with what - this has been the hard work. I'd suggest that this instrument  replicates my compositional preferences to some degree.

Whatever the snotterati might think of laptop performance this is a versatile, expressive and flexible musical instrument, as much of an instrument as all the zithers and marimbas I've ever made in the past. It can be used as a studio instrument or played live where there's enough to keep me sweating for a full set. Book me and I'll show you. Or visit my tape label when it's up and running.

Finally I'd love to collaborate with other musicians. Either to record individuals and ensembles as they rehearse or experiment or to invite artists to send me their own audio files, tailored to one or other of the different lengths I use in the folders. Look out for news on this.

​Thanks for reading.
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one track from the 'messy' window
Picture
the clean window
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Archiving

20/8/2022

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I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from James Tugwell, Record Label Liaison of the British Library Sound Archive. He invited me to donate my compositions to be catalogued,  archived & preserved as part of the nation's audio & cultural heritage. The music will be made available to anyone (writers, researchers etc.) holding a British Library readers pass at either the London site and the Yorkshire site in Boston Spa. Of course I was very happy to be able to contribute.

That's one thing. The other is actually accessing audiences, playing live music to people. I've spoken before about this problem, living rurally and remotely, out of the various loops, struggling to get on the circuit or connect with the various new music scenes and circuits, especially in the UK. A lot of this is social and I'm pretty much a lone wolf here in the Borders.

So any promoters out there, please have a listen to my work which is well documented on this site and if you think my music would appeal to your audiences give me a shout and I'll be happy to talk.
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The Articulate Particulator (part 1)

12/8/2022

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Brief Description (pdf)
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I don't know what it should be called. The names might fluctuate a little. There's a big back-story to this project. The Particulate Articulator is a software instrument written in Max. I won't assume that everyone reading this knows what Max is hence the link. For my purposes it's a virtual environment into which you drag and drop different objects with different behaviours then join them together with virtual cables to make synthesisers and other digital instruments. Others use it for video, managing complex multi-media environments and unheard-of geekeries beyond my ken.

The idea 'came to me' in strange circumstances of which I'll say more later. As some of you know I work with recorded sound. I record everything - natural environments, incidental sounds, objects, materials, instruments, electronic devices, hand-made gadgets - anything and everything that will serve a musical purpose. My compositional method is built around explorations into morphology (the shapes of sounds) dense textural layers and complexity. I've tried so many different ways of performing new music, for example the method of live mixing various streams of sound across several channels, changed on the fly, often performed to some kind of personal score. That works very well.  

Or gathering together interesting sound-making devices and electronic devices on a table (the 'car-boot sale' model) and improvising freely. That model works also very well and regularly serves hundreds of great musicians. But looking for something different and more specific it took me some time to realise that a new instrument had to be designed and built, extending the work I did in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was into just intonation and making my own versions of Harry Partch's diy orchestras out of metal, wood and glue.

Following the unexpected mysterious and 'you-won't-believe-me' insight into what needed doing I taught myself Max (badly) then designed and built the Articulate Particulator which in essence replicates many of my compositional preferences though in a more chopped up, randomised and therefore somewhat less predictable manner. The patch (the layout of the objects and cables on the page) is very messy and over-complicated. It looks like somebody's tipped a load of Max objects on the page then invited a child to mess it all up. A teenager could make it in five minutes using one tenth of the cables and objects. As a first-year University assignment it might scrape a D-minus. However (by one definition at least) it is a proper musical instrument and more importantly it actually does what I want. Next up I'll explain how it all works. Thanks for reading.
​
(part 2)
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Ever Emerging

26/6/2022

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Since composing Charivari, which by the way still needs a companion piece to make a publication, I've been sidetracked by lens-based activities. I really do find photography and experimental film-making compelling but have struggled to gather align these emerging practices with the ideas that drive my musical work. But eventually you find a way, an interest in form, environments, ecosystems, evolutionary complexity, layers of sound, layers of meaning, a properly scientific experimental mindset underpinned by a research-driven methodology. 

Photography led me (back) to landscape practice on the one hand and the world of objects and human culture on the other. Landscape practice, which in my case fundamentally involves a lot of time walking around local forests, rivers and moorlands, led me to a fresh appreciation of a strand of film-making, story telling and mood-setting that had always appealed to me but which I'd never pursued seriously. This being the eerie, the unsettled, the genre of folk horror, the tales of M.R. James and Nigel Kneale, old BBC ghost stories, the wyrd, deeper understandings of the complexities of the English landscape and rural culture in film and literature. I find contemporary understandings of English landscape fascinating and I'd love to share my reflections sometime on the perspectives of a new generation of film-makers. Closer to home, here in the Borders, I'm caught up in the tangled web of 'difficult' landscapes, the weight of human history, the historical ballads, patterns of land ownership and uses.  

It took me several years, ever-emerging, to understand the grammar(s) of film-making and of the kind of films I wanted to make. Throughout that time I rarely worked on sound design, arguably my strongest suite. I couldn't put imagery and sound together successfully (according to my definition) until I'd grasped the difficulties of shooting and editing moving imagery. Shooting films in forests on your own for example can be a messy business and there's no easy or logical way to establish a workflow (a useless word used mainly on YouTube instructional videos). I do have some background in understanding film sound, partly through a strand of my doctoral research where, broadly speaking, I examined possible parallels between film sound, photography and field recording. So here I am again working with recorded sound in both field and studio. The microphones and headphones are dusted off and it's almost time to start composing again. It would of course be wonderful to actually perform some music, but there is currently no local or regional platform for experimental music where I live and trying to break into the numerous cliques, cults and gatekeepers of the new music scene  is a thankless task. That needs some work.
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Charivari

2/3/2022

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Depiction of charivari, early 14th century (from the Roman de Fauvel)
Charivari (30:00) [2021/22] is a new composition as yet unpublished. Get in touch if it resonates with your label's aesthetic.

​You can listen to an excerpt here on Bandcamp.

If you want to dig a little deeper into the meaning and history of charivari I'd recommend the Wikipedia page which is well researched and accurate from what I can tell. But I want to write a little about the word and its meaning and why I chose it as a title for the composition so I'll draw freely from the Wikipedia article. Charivari took me about nine months to compose which is quite unusual, maybe even dreadful, in an era where many experimental musicians are turning out new work every other week. The piece began as one thing then became another. I unravelled an initial composition and started again. Such is the experimental method where you work patiently and without reward until the work grows a tiny leg, then an arm, then a head and so forth. I'm very pleased with the work and it represents where I'm at in my research and practice if I can put it like that.

Charivari was a European and North American folk custom in which a mock parade accompanied by raucous music barged its way through a community. Because the crowd aimed to make as much noise as possible using anything that came to hand these parades were often referred to as 'rough music'. There are many socio-political dimensions to these events which show interesting geographical variation .

The origin of the word charivari is likely from the Vulgar Latin caribaria, plural of caribarium, already referring to the custom of rattling kitchenware with an iron rod, itself probably from the Greek καρηβαρία (karēbara), literally "heaviness in the head" but also used to mean "headache", from κάρα "head" and βαρύς "heavy". You get the idea.

A common usage of the word today is in relation to circus performances, where a charivari opens the show with noise, tumbling clowns and other performers entering into the playing space. 

I'll write more on this in relation to the writings of Rabelais and Mikhail Bhaktin's Rabelais and his World, two authors who provided an important strand of my research.
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CONTAGION

18/1/2022

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radiophonic work-in-progress

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I recently published Jericho as a digital download and before that I wrote three short articles on recorded sound and sympathetic magic.  I'm currently at the R&D phase of a new project for radio called Contagion. This will combine my interests in electroacoustic composition and photography, taking account of the ideas developed across the three Marcel Mauss articles in the form of spoken word layered with different sounds. 

The pandemic has forced many of us to dig deep in our respective practices. Some good work in different media is emerging from engagements with the domestic and other immediate environments. In Contagion I want to look at and listen to those objects in the domestic and personal environment which carry sympathetic resonance of the kind discussed in my articles on Mauss and magic. Listening will involve activating and energising objects of interest, paying attention to interior and exterior spaces and using recording technologies to reveal sounds beyond the everyday experience. This will be followed by a deep consideration of the musical potential of such sounds though this won't be a musical composition as such. Looking will require taking stock of the hundreds of possessions accumulated over years that we insist on hoarding for sentimental or even irrational reasons, then figuring out how to represent these as photographs, whether as still lifes or as elements in a documentary investigation. An (anarchic?) archive.
​
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The Macedonian Space Programme

16/11/2021

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Wyness | Ristevski
Mdira Records

1. Trappist 1d (16:59)
2. Teegarden c (12:23)
3. Proxima Centauri b (15:46)

James Wyness (guitars) 
Boban Ristevski (electronics)

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How Slow is Slow? (part 2)

23/6/2021

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I wrote about sourcing sounds for composition. There's obviously more to it than simply recording sounds or events. The whole process is anthropological and therefore complex. When it comes to editing and processing these recorded sounds things are, on the face of it, much simpler. 

I transfer recorded sounds from the recording device to the computer then I edit them and compose using software applications. I could equally do this on a multi-track analogue tape recorder and I know some composers who still do. First I use Steinberg's Wavelab to listen back to the sounds. This takes a long time because I'm trying all the time to listen for possibilities beyond the actual sounds before me. I trim and level up the audio files, removing any unwanted sections, then open them up in Reaper, a digital audio workstation application which has a very simple time stretch function. This is where the sounds are timestretched, lengthened more often than shortened, a procedure which reveals new morphologies and further potential. At the same time I apply equalisation or filtering, which reduces or boosts frequencies, reduction being by far the most common procedure. I use a digital equaliser called Equilibrium made by DMG Audio which was recommended by a professional sound engineer. It offers digital emulations of all the great hardware equalisers and the level of detail and control it affords is unparalleled.

Where does this leave me? Well, from there I build up layers of sound in Wavelab's montage feature, which allows me to stack layers simultaneously, modify volume levels in great detail and process them further if required. This is where a composition comes alive, or dies a slow death. If I've learned anything over the years it's that there's no point in spending four or more hours a day working intensively with audio at fairly high volume and in great detail. The ears become fatigued and musical judgement diminishes. This doesn't mean that you can't work on the piece, it's just that you spend more time thinking about the composition in the abstract, away from the actual sounds, a challenging but interesting process in itself but one which can lead to better decisions own the long run.

With this most recent composition I made two big mistakes, along with all the numerous little ones. First I began working with sounds identical to or very similar to sounds that I'd used before. This undermines an approach to music, a core of my practice, which requires a fresh investigation with each new work. Why it took me so long to realise the mistake is beyond me. Another mistake, which I identified as it happened and which led to a resolution of all the major problems, was that I began trawling through my archives looking for 'something else' or something 'more suitable'. That's when the penny dropped and from there I returned to some of the less prominent sounds in my original work. The principal sounds here were of a joiner fitting out the inside of a nearby shop (which acted as a resonant cavity) taken on the street opposite the Abbey walls which reflected and dispersed the sounds around the built environment. 

Sometimes we do actually learn from our mistakes but not as fast or as well as we'd like.
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How Slow is Slow?

4/6/2021

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Perhaps the most important and possibly the least interesting aspect of electroacoustic composition is the provenance of sound sources. They're obviously important because without them you don't have any raw material but if too much is made about them they become fetishised and the work becomes about the objects or recordings and not about the eventual abstractions, modifications and transformations that produce make the eventual music, the latter being difficult to talk or write about (unlike the sources) or to generate images and other media that people might understand. But a photograph has its own value so here are some of the sound sources that have occupied me for the last few months, day after day, week after week (did I mention slow?).
Exciting? No. Apart from the frame drums and bristly toothbrushes which make a nice photo, the welding machine and oven are somewhat mundane. One could of course contextualise the interest in machines as a concern with the ethnography of technology but in all honesty I'm not in the least concerned with that here. At the time I heard and recorded these sounds I simply found them interesting and worthy of further examination. 

Played well the frame drums or duffs are fine instruments but in my work I spend most of my initial preparations trying to eke out, often unconventionally, specific sounds for further treatment in this case the sounds of the skin being activated by wire brushes. Each duff has its own unique set of inner morphologies or sound-shapes determined by size, shape, mass and materials. The wire brushes tease out the sounds I wanted very well, offering shapes that ranged from the percussive to the quasi-melodic/harmonic as some of the activations released a rising harmonic series. The sounds of welding (in this project carried out by an actual welder) is somewhat predictable but there are all manner of subtleties as the metals and rods expand and contract, punctuated by near silences and the soft hiss of gases being released as the heat builds up.

​So much for the initial recordings and I'll come to the oven sounds later but my last word on this first stage is that there is no rule that I've managed to set which determines how much time I should spend on this or that sound, then on the combinations, before it becomes evident that something isn't working as well as I thought it would. I therefore work slowly. My next activity involves two processes, both carried out in the digital domain, these being timestretching and filtering (or equalising) the recordings. That phase will form the subject of my next post on composition. Thanks for visiting. 


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    James Wyness

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    • music >
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