Just intonation bowed strings

Music
1

Inspired by Ben Johnston string quartets, using 7-limit JI. Infinitely ascending spiral of roots: 1, 7/4, 3/2, 3/2 * 7/4, 3/2 * 3/2, 3/2 * 3/2 * 7/4, etc. Each root is played four times in random octaves, for each instance there’s a random chance of a fifth interval that slides by one of 3/2, 9/8, or 8/9, or a trill with 9/8 or 7/6. I’ve been experimenting with bowed string physical modeling outside of SuperCollider, but here the synthesis is just plain old subtractive, a saw wave amplitude modulated by lowpassed white noise (see Mignot & Valimaki’s Extended Subtractive Synthesis) and then run through 5 randomly tuned comb filters for instrument body. Despite the simplicity I think it sounds ok, but the cello register is a little buzzy and artificial to me, not sure of the best way to improve on that. There is a random, smooth global “intensity” LFO that modulates a bunch of parameters including amplitude and high-frequency attenuation of all instruments, giving a sense of ensemble-level fluctuation. This is part of an ongoing exploration into faking human-like expressiveness in synthesized and algorithmic music.

8 Likes
2

This is extremely cool!

I’d be curious to hear it with a DWGBowed synth (if it doesn’t blow out CPU time).

hjh

3

This is awesome, Nathan, I love the texture in these sounds!

You often show your code in your videos but it’s usually a little hard to understand exactly what’s going on from that – I don’t suppose the code is available anywhere? I’d love to play around with it in order to learn a bit more sc and how to put sounds together. I love how it seems to be pretty brief code with fairly simple ideas as you explained but obviously there’s real craft here (and in your other work); I’m intrigued.

5

Thanks Nathan, I totally understand. Wouldn’t normally have asked for code, but I was already squinting at it in the youtube video so I thought perhaps it was meant to be looked at :wink:
I’ll have to think about your description above and see what I can come up with myself, then!

6

This is beautiful and original. Thank you for sharing. Will check out your other music too!