Music: Faburden Dimension

I was reading Baltzell's A Complete History of Music. An old music history book from 1907, public domain in the Gutenberg project. It introduces historical approaches to musical harmony, including Faburden or Falsoborden from the earliest centuries of medieval era.

I took the Faburden intervals, and played them back in G with a choir synth. Simple harmony, very smooth sound with a decent choir.

I then decided to formulate atonal composition from the harmonic voice singing intervals.

Multiples of 0.33 seconds

I fed the choir samples into a simple but crazy machine of sound modulation! An cyclic amplitude envelope with variable envelope shape. Cycle lenght in ascending multiples of 0.33 seconds, modulating pitch by multiples of octave. Some careful thought on using square wave, sawtooth or inverse sawtooth for the envelope.

The rather white-noise -like choir sample first splits up into a staccato of choppy choral arcs, then into bell-like rumbles and chimes.

Reverb on an improvized Square Wave FM synth

After transforming the samples into sequences of chimes and rumbles, I added the longest reverb I could find. Light and Dark shimmerred into my ears from this lucky combination of octave transpositions and 0.33 second cycles, starting at multiples of 0.33 s after each other.

With light and dark I added a little joke of a demonic voice that is sung away by the last remaining audio-splinter of the Faburden choir that was fed into this cyclic envelope warp. So there's that sample flavor, underneath, as its about the battle of light and dark. It ends at detuned choir sample. Added good amount of VHS tape noise to get a demo-tape atmosphere.

Just a cheap postmodern sound pastiche; fun practice work. And had some more fun making a blue spiraloid video for it.