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Hentai​-​Oto​-​Ma

by Ben Harper

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Narre Warren 25:10
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about

Last pieces for digital synthesis. 2001–2006.

Made with AudioMulch, Coagula Light and Granulab, controlled by
chance-generated MIDI scores. All mixes are indeterminate.

Hentai-Oto-Ma (2001) was made using Coagula Light, a shareware “colour-organ” that interprets digital images as sound spectra (height=frequency, width=time). The image source for this piece was a pornographic Japanese manga comic: each digitally scanned frame of the comic was interpreted with five different, variable time-frames and pitch ranges. The five sequences of frames are played simultaneously, each subjected to different filtering and panning processes. In effect, the piece is a type of timbral canon, with the same series of tone structures transposed into different frequencies and durations - this can be heard most clearly at the end of the piece.

Subterranean Clover (version 2) (2002) is another canon made with Coagula, in an attempt to make two pieces using the same software and techniques sound as different as possible. This time, a single image of a random spatter of dots was interpreted through every possible rotation and mirror-image, within a very narrow pitch range. This process was repeated across 9 octaves, each voice with a different permutation of image rotations, and each kept within the pitch range of “just noticeable difference” to produce timbral variations upon a single pitch.

Narre Warren (2003, revised 2006) began life as part of a larger, programmatic work titled Immanence of the Eater and the Eaten. It formed the basis of the concluding section:

...the scene shifts to a carport in Glen Waverley. Two teenagers attempt to foment suburban revolution by channelling the ghosts of Robin Boyd and Iannis Xenakis, and then challenging each other to an apocalyptic game of ping-pong. The activity summons the ghost of Percy Grainger, who immediately devises a free music machine in the form of a ping-pong table shaped like a three-dimensional Galton board, down which balls may continually cascade according to the laws of probability.

The piece is built upon one of the clichés of traditional musique concrète: the manipulated sound of a bouncing pingpong ball. A recording of John Rodgers and Erkki Veltheim “playing” ping pong was processed through Granulab, a granular synthesis program. Granulab enables the user to perform in real-time, manipulating the sound through various mixes of user-defined patches specifying how the source sound may be transformed. For Narre Warren, the recording of this Granulab performance was further developed in AudioMulch, using constant alterations in the filtering and compression of selected frequency ranges.

Anything We Don’t Have To Do (2005) combines two sound sources: a General MIDI library of generic sampled instrument sounds, and amplified line noise from a cheap sound card. A chance-determined score selects from either or both sources, then subjects the sound to various permutations of processes to pitch-shift, time-shift, and/or digitially degrade the sampled sound. A series of variations rings the changes on possible combinations of sound and process.

The Night We Burned Down Bimbo Deluxe (2006) reads data from an orphaned “temporary” file left on the computer, as though it were sound data. (In fact, the file appears to contain a garbled part of an earlier take of Anything We Don’t Have To Do.) The file was subjected to four types of randomised filtering through parametric equalisers in AudioMulch, with rapid, randomised crossfading between each of the four outputs.

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released March 29, 2016

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Ben Harper London, UK

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