This week I’m talking about harmonic series subsets and sleeping on gym floors. I’ll start with the latter:
3 things about the gym floor:
… it was where we slept
We rehearsed on a football field, we arrived at the stadium, we warmed up in the parking lot, we played in the competition… and then we sat on the bus: all night. Bus sleep isn’t the same. As merciless as the staff was about making use of every possible minute, if we drove from midnight until 7 am they weren’t going to make us get out there again without at least a couple hours of real sleep. We staggered into the gym, shooed away those overfed summer cockroaches, and collapsed together onto 125 sleeping bags.
… it was really resonant
Occasionally we would do a “stand-still” inside the gym at the school where we were rehearsing/sleeping. The sound was crazy. We spend all summer playing music almost exclusively outdoors, in perfect clarity. To then hit a drum even once in any indoor space was aurally shocking enough… but on a basketball court… it was like the universe imploding. In the middle of all that sound I sometimes wasn’t sure if we were playing forward or in reverse.
… it was the site of our only “down-time”
Sometimes rehearsal would get rained out. This happened way less often than you’d think. I was a California kid with very little “summer downpour” experience, but Ryan was from New York. He had the “sense.” We’d be running a section of drill for the 3rd hour straight on some high school football field in some small town somewhere on the east coast and I’d see clouds in the distance. I’d glance at Ryan hopefully and he’d look up.
“Sorry man, not today.”
Dang. But I wasn’t disappointed every time: occasionally he’d give a nod. Yes, the sky was about to open up. And that meant one thing — run for cover to the gym, line the drums up in a neat little row on one wall, and lay down on my sleeping bag. Sweet, delicious, desperately-needed rest. The rain poured outside. Petrichor from miles of newly-wet blacktop wafted in. Paradise.
Gymnasium
This new track is a recollection of that “down time” feeling. It’s a peaceful relief within an odd unreality: I’m not really sure what I am, and I’ve been disconnected from the real world for weeks. It’s like a dream where I’m not sure if I’m on my sleeping bag or still in rehearsal — the resonance of marching percussion echoing through a wood-paneled gym hangs in the air. Then I doze off.
The Tuning
This track uses a simple subset of the harmonic series as its tuning: partials #16 to #31.
There are 16 partials in that range:
In a recent post, I let Destiny’s Child explain to us all how factors of 2 have such a high degree of “sameness” that we can give them the same name:
In this piece, for each of the 16 partials, I am also including any factors of 2 as an option.
Another way to think of this: I’m including the pitch that has the same name, an octave below any even-numbered partial. As numbers, it looks like this:
We call this “octave equivalency” — for example: the entire left-most column (partials 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16) are all the “same pitch.” In this case, C.
Interesting, above, that each octave octave starting on a blue dot has half as many pitches as the octave above it. Hmm.
Octave equivalency is an extremely important concept in tuning — accepting all factors of 2 as the same pitch (or tempo) means that you can focus the resources of analysis on other elements. There are only so many dimensions you can visualize at once. (I can’t wait to show you what I’m talking about in future posts).
Here’s what it looks like to line up all 32 in a row, then split them into their octave equivalencies:
One more very interesting thing to notice!
On a piano keyboard, there are 12 notes in any octave. But if you count the pitches between octaves in the harmonic series, it’s different depending on where you start!
For example: the octave between partials #5 and #10 contains 5 pitches. The octave between #14 and #24 contains… 14. See the pattern? Choose any partial in the harmonic series, and the octave above it contains that number of pitches.
I’ve treated partial #16 as the tonal center for this piece — therefore my octave has 16 pitches. Each one below it has half as many.
The otherness
So if I’ve cut up the piano tuning into 16 notes per octave instead of 12, you might assume it would sound very strange… even “out of tune.” And yet, this music sounds very consonant… Almost like it’s more in tune? How is that possible?
I would describe this as a very consonant tuning that dips its toe into 👽 “otherness.”
Most people are familiar with the idea of “dissonance” — it’s the counterpoint to “consonance.” In the same way, “otherness” is the counterpoint to “sameness.”
The experience of otherness in music, as I describe it, relates directly to prime numbers. Would you believe me if I told you that you’ve both evolved and been conditioned to make sense out of pitch relationships in factors of 2, 3, and 5… but not 7, 11, or 13? Our ears continue to evolve.
More on this idea forthcoming, but for the time being, that “otherness” can be heard here in certain partials, specifically the 21st, which I’ve used extensively, including in the very first chord:
The gym floor
Finally, a quick note about the process for creating the percussion — I’ve used a sampled drumline recording: chopped up, heavily time-stretched, and reversed. There are bits of the metronome in the background, pitch-shifted to match the tuning of the chords.
This represents one of three methods I’ll be outlining for incorporating marching percussion into my music. All three have proved endlessly fruitful for making unconventional, fresh-sounding rhythmic material in electronic music.
It also helps capture the experience of life on the gym floor, where the resonance was intense and the sound of rehearsal rang in my ears as I slept:
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