Music by Charles Céleste HUTCHINS

First Night

https://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/podcast/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/FirstNight.mp3 Every night of Hanukkah, one more candle is lit than the previous night. This piece, for the first night, is about that one candle burning – one long drone, one sound, changing but constant. This piece was made in SuperCollider. It is made up of 180 sine waves, each starting at one note in the Ben Johnston’s combined otonal-utonal scale and sliding slowly to another note. Also per holiday tradition, this is intended as a fundraiser for a worthy cause. Please consider donating to Rainbow Migration. cafdonate.cafonline.org/111#/DonationDetails They support LGBTQI+ people through the UK asylum and immigration process. Their vision is a world where there is equality, dignity, respect and safety for all people in the expression of their sexual or gender identity. Or, if you are in the US, please donate to the National Center for Transgender Equality secure2.convio.net/ncftge/site/Donation2;jsessionid=00000000.app268b?df_id=1480&mfc_pref=T&1480.donation=form1&NONCE_TOKEN=C5EA18E62F736227261DC4CE5C50ADBE

Shorts #44: November 2024

November 2024 This piece titled by Sonia Elks. Artistic feedback from Paula Gazzard. There’s a principle in psychoacoustics called “stream segregation”. When you listen to somebody playing a lot of notes on the piano, but there’s a clear melody, this is because your brain groups some of the notes together. It “segregates” “streams” of notes by pitch. However, there are only so many streams you can recognise at a time. If you have more than that, the phenomenon is called “wall of noise.” In that case, your brain doesn’t know where the melody is. A constantly changing texture has some voices seem to come to the front and then retreat. No two people hear a wall of noise in the same way. This piece has 47 different voices of sinusoidal grains. Each voice varies it’s pitch and panning position very slightly with every note. Each note is extremely short, although they do gradually double in average duration and then return to their original lengths. The longer pitches become “glissons”, which is a short sine wave that moves from one pitch to another instead of staying steady. The very end overlaps the 47 granular voices with 47 glissandos.

A Slippery Place

This piece was written for Lev Taylor. When trying to pick a religious name, I raised the idea of “Glitch” with my rabbi, who was initially nonplussed. In Yiddish, it means a mistake or a slip up. It’s in English that it’s come to mean a voltage spike and to go on to name a genre of digital art. I made this piece out of a photo of Rabbi Lev Taylor, which I found on the internet. I used a script to glitch hundreds of copies of the Jpeg and stitch them into a film. I also played the Jpeg as it it were an audio file. Then I converted it to a larger file format and stretched it with PaulStretch. I used SuperCollider’s PV_RandComb ugen to pick a few frequencies to play at a time. Due to the maths of the FFT, this tends toward high pitches. I stitched everything together and sent him this piece. Honestly, I like the idea of going by Glitch so much, I’m thinking about what contexts I could use it in. Art, sure! Everyday life?

Shorts #42: Lacewing

Lacewing This piece was commissioned and titled by Tim Walters. This piece has two instruments – one uses the Ringz Ugen in SuperCollider and the other is a Sine wave which is phase modulated by another sine wave where both are tuned to the same frequency. It is in harmonic minor, tuned with the default just tuning. Harmonic minor is known as “Mogen Ovos” to klezmer musicians. Rather than apply western harmony practice (except for the final cadence), every player is picking notes independently. The just tuning helps hold the notes in a key centre.

Shorts #41: Catalyst

Shorts #41: Catalyst. Commissioned and titled by Andy Bannister This piece was commissioned and titled by Andy Bannister. Explaining why he picked this title, he said, “My thought process for this, is that the first half sounds like a catalyst for a reaction towards the latter half which could also be interpreted the sound of a substance or object changing state, like liquid to gas etc.” The time elapsed between the original commission and this post is a lot longer than usual and I can’t remember how the piece was made, but according to my filing system, it was made using chaos synthesis on a Eurorack. This is a type of frequency modulation where oscillator A modulates oscillator B, which modulates oscillator C which modulates oscillator A. This is an exciting system because the feedback makes it chaotic.