Asimov’s Thiotimoline is a fictional metal which is ‘endochronic’ – it sublimates BEFORE contact with water, having molecular bonds in the past, present and future. This reminded me of my own practice of mindfulness as someone with ADHD. The meditation bowl/bell is a locus of that activity, and so with this piece, I tried to reimagine the activity with a bowl made of this fictional, busy material.
The techniques used in this piece were chosen to intentionally contrive typical spatio-temporal relations. This is mirrored in the arrangement as – although the piece is designed as a perfect loop – the beginning of the piece is granular and an extremely unnatural replica of the ending water texture (a digital impersonation of itself). However, this is done in such a manner that it can only be detected as such due to its juxtaposition with the water playback at the end of the piece. Not only does this arrangement choice serve to disrupt the temporal linearity of cognition of the piece, but it echoes the supposed futility felt when my short-lived, mindfulness-induced reprieve is confronted with a return to the neurotypical, concrete world.
Process:
The entire piece is composed from transformations of the following source materials:
- Wok in water
- A tree and its birds in the shadow of the Basilica,
- The road from the practice rooms at the Lyon conservatoire
- Gare de Nord and Gare de Lyon train stations
Modulations in Max/MSP:
Making the sound of a metal which has bonds to other temporal locations
- Spectral scrubbing on wok sounds – this is essentially a 2-axis particle simulation, whereby the y axis corresponds to some spectral filtering, and the x to granular synthesis. I used ‘emit’ in Max for Live to achieve this.
- I also cross-modulated the sounds with different time periods of themselves, I hoped to aesthetically introduce the otherworldly, implied properties of Thiotomoline. On the other hand, by utilising decay on my resonant filter with real-world feedback, I hoped to root such an element in a space. Even though the superimposed, cross-modulated sound interacts with itself endochronically, the ‘real-world’ listener still perceives it as being here. This is because its sounds bounce off walls and into our eardrums just as anything else would.
- I used a scale-quantised resonance filter locked to large interval jumps in order to modulate field recordings. With 20 mc.poly-based copies of itself, I used this to simulate sounds of pitched rain on metal.
Environmental resonance
- Birds used to frequency modulate train sounds. I leveraged just intonation and inharmonicity to imply metal overtones
- I took a short recording of running water and indefinitely reproduced it with granular synthesis.