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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / kevanatkins's music / Lullaby #1 - Band-Pass Love Poem

Lullaby #1 - Band-Pass Love Poem

By kevanatkins on February 9, 2016 4:29 pm

This work is based on a generative ambient piece which I put together to get myself to sleep last night. However, in this version I reveal a bit more of the process as I gradually bring in the treatment. I left it running the whole night in one state (as you hear around ~7'30"). One of the best night's sleep I've had in months.

It is based around randomly generated very low sine notes, which are treated with reverb, then heavily distorted and wave shaped and in order to add a lot of high-order harmonics. The output is filtered more and more with a band-pass filter until a small band of the harmonics are isolated, which results in the melodic fragments that you hear.

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This is absolutely wonderful. Are you into Brian Eno at all? Or Robert Fripp? Not that I'm making a comparison, but this slow, long, unfolding stuff is just right in that vein.

It surprises me somewhat that this helped you sleep, it's quite active really.

Also that score excerpt is rad. What is it?

Happy Valentines Day!
Great transformation, really love the 'melodic' section in the middle. It reminds me of slowly being submerged into the Mariana Trench, actually happened to me last Summer, you know?

vinpous wrote:

This is absolutely wonderful. Are you into Brian Eno at all? Or Robert Fripp? Not that I'm making a comparison, but this slow, long, unfolding stuff is just right in that vein.

It surprises me somewhat that this helped you sleep, it's quite active really.

Also that score excerpt is rad. What is it?

In reverse order:

Score except: My own. It's a pun on the original title as the circuit schematic shown is an active band-pass filter circuit, which I combined with a small fragment of the generated melody from the bandpass filter, which I transcribed. The original title was going to be Band-Pass Love Song. So that's what that is. I did it in Illustrator using glyphs from Bravura and some basic primitives to do the notation. I thought the original title felt a bit too naff, so I changed it to poem, as melodies have been set to poems. And it's also a reference to the orchestral tone poems, particularly of the impressionists which I've always loved.

It surprises me too what helps me sleep. The opening section of inharmonicity study #1 (that gongy texture before the first noise burst) actually was a piece in itself which helped me get to sleep. I just had SuperCollider end the sequence at whatever time I needed to wake up.

Hmm. I haven't thought about it up until now. I guess Eno and musical descendants were definitely staples in my early adolescence. It wouldn't surprise me some of their influence snuck through. Music for Airports and On Land got me to sleep for years. I was introduced to Robert Fripp in late high school by my guitar teacher Mike (from Toehider). Might explain why I continued electronic music from that point.

Lyons wrote:

Happy Valentines Day!
Great transformation, really love the 'melodic' section in the middle. It reminds me of slowly being submerged into the Mariana Trench, actually happened to me last Summer, you know?

Valentines Day. That ol' chestnut. Me all cuddled up here with my... pile of audio cables, chocolate, laptop and study scores.

Wait until you hear the 2 hour long version which will be installed at the Love/City Festival on Friday the 26th at Testing Grounds as part of a series curated by Tilde. Heh.

Yes, this would definitely benefit by being longer. Too bad WB's size limit resulted in an 80bit file. Or was that deliberate?

Yeah, I had to use VBR to encode it because of the file size limit. I will put higher resolution versions up eventually. Going back over my terminal history these were the options I used after some experimentation to get the filesize down without totally reaming it: lame -v -q0 wk6.wav

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