Subharmonies

Putting on my touring musician hat again after some time to play at Cluster in Winnipeg. I’ll be performing my quadraphonic Rückstreuung project, which made its debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. Here’s an excerpt from that performance:

live excerpt of the quadraphonic project rüstreuung @ MOCA, Toronto in 2022

As you can see from the video, it’s really about architecture and space. The quadraphonic dissemination is explicitly chosen to allow for the tones to intersect and create rhythms and to allow the listener to discover tones that are located in specific places. Moving from one space to another reveals different sound interactions.

The project was created at Akademie der Künste during a residency at the Studio for Electroacoustic Music, where I was able to experiment on the venerable Subharchord, one of the few still functioning:

the subharchord @ Akademie der Künste SEM

Here’s where I ended up (thanks to Robert Lippok for taking the video):

Since I don’t have a Subharchord (boo) I’m using a Moog Subharmonicon, which uses the same principle of audio synthesis. The “sub” in both those names refers to the fact that instead of overtones from a fundamental pitch (which is what many synths do), these instruments divide the frequency to create subharmonies to the fundamental. Tuning these sub levels results in intersection of tones, and the use of a filter further allows one to shape the quality of the sound.

I’m really looking forward to going back to Winnipeg. I’m playing at a venue that I was at the opening of, the West End Cultural Centre – in fact, I think my mom performed at that opening. I’ve played there many times since, and it’s going to be nice to go home and explore that space with sound.

See you there?

UPDATE: I found this so I’m going to try and build it in Max/MSP. It’ll probably take me a year. ↓

quasi schematic from subharchord.com

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