Kalakunath
Beneath Kalakunath's icy surface lies an ecosystem sustained by glowing crystals, providing the heat and light necessary for life. The planet was once home to the Kalakunathi, an advanced alien species who built a civilization underground using the crystals' power. The Kalakunathi, whose growing population became too much for the caverns below, sought to expand above ground. They created giant machines programmed to carve new buildings out of the planet's abundance of ice and stone on the surface. Little else is understood about the Kalakunathi, but it's believed their desire to expand unleashed a primeval malevolence that led to their eventual extinction.
“Kalakunath” tells the story of one of these abandoned machines as it reawakens and stirs to life, its gears grinding and motors whirring as it struggles to break free from its icy prison. At the climax of the piece, the machine unleashes its full power as it walks across the surface, its massive limbs crashing down upon the ice with thunderous force. This is a WIP for my upcoming album: Material Neverland.
Synergy
Music
“Synergy” focuses on the recent AI model developed by Harmonai called Dance Diffusion, which can produce short 3-5 sounds inspired by the training data. For this track, I finetuned the pretrained glitch.cool model on my own sound design. Through my arrangement and processing of the resulting Dance Diffusion output material, I intend to sculpt the childlike way that AI is trained to understand (in a sense) and produce human art and music into a work that grapples with the acceptance, fear, and awe of recent AI advancement and integration into our lives. Then by collaborating with AI to produce an honest work of art, I attempt to illustrate the positive potential of AI technology in the arts.
ephemera
This piece combines elements of math rock, hard rock, dubstep, and color bass.
The Last Strix
The Strix were large databases of knowledge that belonged to an ancient civilization long ago. Little is known about the Strix; a tale as old as time recounts how their boundless knowledge corrupted the ancient creatures that used them, plunging the planet into madness. Recognizing the destruction the Strix had brought to the land, the hero of this tale endeavored to start anew free from their reign, destroying both the Strix and the creatures exploiting them. Opting to leave a relic of their existence, one last Strix was created to help the next intelligent civilization that would rise to power. The Last Strix, unlike the previous Strix which had no bounds to their knowledge, required a blood ritual and sacrifice of one of their own people in exchange for the answer to any question one desired, effectively limiting the amount of knowledge any individual could access.
This piece is a depiction of the sacrificial “knowledge” ritual. Once a year, the new generation of creatures on the planet conducts a ritual sacrifice, offering one of their own in exchange for the vital knowledge required to optimize the growth and harvest of food for their agrarian civilization. You will hear the sounds of birds, bells, low rumbly machinery, rain, a shakuhachi (a Japanese flute), and the 1969 American Apollo 11 Mission (all of which were generated using various ML methods). At the climax of the piece, you will hear the sounds of “trickling water” depicting the running blood of the sacrifice.
Unofficial Remixes
Software
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Software /
bbphysics_midigenerator
The bbphysics_midigenerator is a Max for Live patch that offers a new approach to generating melodies and chords! Inside its tiny window, it contains a physics simulation in two dimensions where any number between 1-50 balls can interact with each other as physical objects. When one of the balls collides with the square that contains them, a random midi note from the combination of 12 notes selected by the user is sent to Ableton Live. This project uses the jit.phys Max object library.
bbwaveshape_interpolator
The bbwaveshape_interpolator Max for Live patch allows users to draw, save, and interpolate between their favorite waveshapes. This patch uses the lookup~ object to replace each incoming sample value with a new one specified by the user's drawing.
bbpolyphonic_resonator
Inspired by the sound of Zynaptiq’s Pitchmap plugin, I made a polyphonic resonator Max for Live patch that achieves a similar sound using basic phase cancellation and band filtering (version 3 forthcoming). The plugin includes resonating scales and chords, changing effect intensity via “q” size, excluding undesired scale degrees, and sweeping between different scales and chords using the “slide” feature. I gave a research presentation on this patch at Gettysburg College on June 24th, 2023.
Ugomeki
蠢き is an audiovisual composition about the Japanese word “ugomeki” which roughly translates to “to wriggle, to squirm, to crawl like a worm.” Accepted into the 2023 NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival and International Computer Music Conference.