Crystallization

Andreja Andric 2018

Caution if you are wearing headphones: extremely loud sounds

To perform on any device with a web browser, ideally on a smartphone. Variable duration. Uses HTML5 Web Audio API. It is currently compatible with most modern desktop browsers, Chrome on Android phones and Chrome or Safari on iPhones.

Develop the performance by subsequently adding individual notes to the repeating sound mix. Specify the individual note to be added by setting its relation to the given ground frequency. This you do by changing the multiplier and divisor. The new note will be M/D*F, where M is the multiplier, D the divisor, and F the main frequency. Generally you should increase or decrease either multiplier or divisor in turn, always in a different order. For example: 1/1, 2/1, 3/1, 3/2, 4/2, 4/3, 5/3, 5/2, etc. Thus the growing sound mass should increase according to some variation on the harmonic series of the ground frequency. Each new note is added to the tone mix at a randomly selected place inside the repeating time cell. Each change is introduced to the sound mix by pressing the Submit button or swiping right on the Swipe panel. Occasionally, do one of the following changes:

  1. When the overall sound becomes close to noise and the component frequencies become barely recognizable, change the Overwrite switch from 0 to 1 for several notes in a row, then change it back to 0. When the Overwrite switch is 1, the new notes overwrite the existing sound mix, otherwise they are added to the existing sound mix.
  2. Change the tonality by changing the Ground Frequency. It can be done in a smaller or bigger steps, or though a combination of smaller or bigger steps. An entire section can be created by changing tonality stepwise, instead of changing the multiplier and divisor.
  3. Double or halve the length of the repeating time cell, by doubling or halving either the Meter or the Duration. This impacts the tempo. Do have slower and faster sections in your performance.
  4. Change the tone color and length of the newly added notes by altering either the Reverb or the Inverse Decay Rate or both.
The sound resolution is 44100 samples per second, but only 1 bit per sample, which, apart from the characteristic noisy sound, creates a direct link between tone intervals and resulting sound color.

Duration is free, but usually around 20 minutes.


Swipe Panel

Last updated May 25th 2018