Music from “an evil subterranean beast.”

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2011-10, Vol.130 (4_Supplement), p.2432-2432
• Main Author: Chafe, Chris
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.3654752

Two recent compositions have capitalized on the great expressive range of a custom-designed music synthesis algorithm. The “Animal” plays a part in Tomato Quintet (a music installation) and Phasor (a contrabass and computer piece). The algorithm is played with live controls, respectively, updates from CO2 sensors and signals from a sensor bow. Nuanced deflections of parameter values elicit characteristic and sometimes quirky behavior. The bounded set of sonic behaviors goes into making up an identifiable personality whose moods or temperaments can be traversed in the music which exploits it. “The computerized sounds were spacey and sometimes menacing, sounding at times like Chafe was trying to tame an evil subterranean beast.” (H. Ying, Global Times, 2011). Animal's algorithm is comprised of the logistic map with two parallel waveguides in its feedback path. Animal can be categorized as a “meta-physical” model or modeling abstraction as seen in earlier integrations of families of physical models (P. Cook, ICMC, 1992) and recombinations of physical model components in physically impossible ways (C. Burns, Composition, 2003). Abstraction opens the door to inclusion of mathematical “parts” from other domains. In Animal's case, the logistic map has been borrowed from population biology.