Unfolding

Music

Title:

Unfolding

Dates:

21-Feb-2025 (inception), 21-Feb-2025 (finalised), 22-Feb-2025 (released)

Artists:

Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund

Artwork by Norman Freund

Digital Scanning by Zachary Freund

Keywords:

Electronic, Experimental, Microtonal, Soundscape, Soma Cosmos, Soma Pipe, Push2

Description:

I have been working on a new digital synthesiser, the CrossFeedFM this month and finally it is in a stable state, documentation done and ready to put it through it's paces on a live production. As usual I have been improvising with it during the development stage to steer and guide design choices, but today was the first time I pressed the record button.

"Unfolding" involved three instruments, my custom synthesiser, CrossFeedFM; the Soma Laboratory Cosmos and the Soma Pipe. The CrossFeedMax is a Max (Cycling 74) standalone patch which accepts performance instructions mainly from the Ableton Push2. The Push2 is placed into User Mode, giving me full artistic control. CrossFeedFM is an eight voice FM synthesiser, with effects of feedback loops, a rhythmic envelope generator, bandpass filter and distortion. Forty parameters are controlled by the Push2 rotary encoders, one row of eight note push buttons to trigger note plays and the remaining 8x7 note push buttons to control various functionality of the synthesiser. The emphasis was on user interaction with the synthesiser rather than a static preset. CrossFeedFM also accepts stereo external audio input, which passes through the CrossFeedFM's rhythmic envelope generator, distortion, delay and bass pass filter. A third party VST was used in CrossFeedFM for reverb.

The CrossFeedFM output was feed into the Soma Cosmos, a drifting memory station (hardware). At the same time I sang into the Soma Pipe (hardware), where it's output was feed into the external audio lines of the CrossFeedFM. So the Cosmos was receiving a mix of digital synthesis and organic interpretations of the human voice via the Pipe.

Some of the Push2 note buttons were mapped to the rhythmic envelop generator, pressing different pads for different rhythmic rates. Two rows of note pads were mapped to the stereo bandpass filter, seven discrete centre frequencies, allowing independent centre frequency sweeps for the left and right audio channels. This produced a sonic field moving in space.

My current digital interface (DI) only has one stereo pair for output and two stereo pairs for input, so recording was passed off from the Cosmos to an analogue tape machine. The tape was then later played back via the DI into Ableton Live to digitise the recording.

CrossFeedFM's voices can be microtonally tuned, now here is where it gets a bit wild. I was building a front end for the tuning interface in a spreadsheet, to cover different tuning methods, one of them Just Intonation (JI). I put in some numbers that I thought were interesting for testing, which then ended up in this composition. The JI tuning ratios are:

(5/5)^1, (7/5)^2, (9/5)^3, (11/5)^4, (13/5)^5, (17/5)^6, (19/5)^7, (23/5)^8

This gave a very wide spread of frequencies, so the reference frequency was set very low at 0.1 Hz. Human hear does not hear anything below about 20 Hz, so what to do? Harmonics and FM modulation, was the answer. The amplitude of FM modulation was set to a massive factor of 230 (so a 0.1 Hz signal for instance has a maximum of 0.1 + 230x0.1 = 23.1 Hz), oh and the (23/5)^8 frequency got clipped to 10kHz. The frequency of modulation was set to 94 Hz. Ok, so now all voices could be heard, time to improvise and zone out.

So I was busy turning knobs on the Cosmos, Push2 and Pipe -- feeding the beast and listening to where it would take me.

What you hear is the recording as it was recorded live, no edits.