COMPOSING WITH PROCESS: PERSPECTIVES ON GENERATIVE AND SYSTEMS MUSIC #6.2
09.05.2012 (37′ 54”)
Curated by Mark Fell and Joe Gilmore. Narrated by Connie Treanor.
Each episode of this series is followed by a special accompaniment programme of exclusive music by some of the leading sound artists and composers working in the field. This show presents two process-led works by German composer Stephan Mathieu and British multidisciplinary artist Russell Haswell.
01:12 Stephan Mathieu ‘Untitled Consort Music’ (fragmento), 2012 (15′ 35”)
17:52 Russell Haswell ‘Oscillographics: the search for unusual images on a Stereo-Phase Scope’, 2012 (20”)
As a child, in the seventies, I spotted oscilloscopes in the background during sci-fi film and television programs. But it wasn’t until the late eighties that I first had the pleasure to attend both vinyl and compact disc mastering sessions. It was during these sessions that I first witnessed the use of a Stereo-Phase Scope or X-Y Oscilloscope. The Stereo-Phase Scope is a visual aid for the mastering engineer; it displays both the phase, DC offset and the stereo width of a two channel audio signal. The constantly shifting images displayed on the scope are also referred to as lissajous patterns. It’s like an oscilloscope (which displays the side elevation of a wave-shape) but imagine, looking at two wave-shapes front-on! Cut to the mid nineties, long before iTunes, there was a Mac based audio player called SoundJam MP (Jeff Robbin and Bill Kincaid) which allowed the use of TechRTATM (www.channld.com) a Stereo-Phase Scope Plug-in – as a result of this, I have always watched a scope, when listening to my sound library. Most music is quite narrow in the stereo field, almost to the point of becoming mono (represented by a vertical line on the scope). This helps when cutting vinyl records or for mono compatible radio playback. Part of my ongoing research is to find different ways to create and control, in real-time, new and interesting shapes and images with only two channels of audio plus Stereo-Phase Scope visualisation. During 2011, I released the CD ACID nO!se Synthesis (Editions Mego), that documents some of my experiments in this field.
The work I contribute here is an unrehearsed (Toshiji Mikawa of the Incapacitants, once instructed me, that a ‘noise-ician’ should never rehearse), raw and unedited demonstration of a device from a 1975 issue of Practical Electronics, that Tom Bugs kindly built and assembled, upon my request in late 2011. To maximise your enjoyment of this podcast, I recommend that you use Audiofile-Engineering’s Spectre (www.audiofile-engineering.com/spectre/) for a vector based Lissajous Pattern accompaniment, or just feed the two audio signals into a X-Y oscilloscope.
Russell Haswell, February 7, 2012
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