Today's project was to start conceptualising how I could develop a piece out of the idea of polyrhythmic sliding that I was playing around with in the second or first week of MoM. This is just going to be a post discussing some of the ideas I explored today.
Conception:
The idea is two voices begin in a polyrhythmic relationship such as 3:2. Expressed in terms of tempo, such as 120bpm:80bpm, one of the voices accelerates to a tempo to create a new polyrhtyhm relationship. A blurred metric modulation. For example, the 120bpm voice might accelerate 200bpm from the previous scenario to make a new polyrhythm of 5:2 (200bpm:80bpm).
Process determining form:
I'm attracted to a sort of Reich/minimal approach for composing this. I aim to determine patterns of moving between tempo ratios from integers 1-5 that lets the piece unfold logically. It's quite easy to make and compare polyrhythms on ableton. I just set up two midi tracks with different subdivision of a quarter note in each. The logical unfolding I'm hoping will emerge through experimenting with different polyrhtyhms by triggering them in Ableton's clip view. This set up will also allow me to experiment and compare different pitch ideas. For now I'm keeping pitch to arbitrary scalic patterns in opposite directions to help distinguish the voices.
Slide time:
What's not so easy is determining the length of time for an accelerando between tempi. I prefer slow accelerandi that are similar sonically to Reich's acoustic phases. Making these resolve perfectly to a specific second tempo is tricky in itself, but the process gets messy when you have pitch.
After a good couple of hours experimenting and developing a couple of accels between voices. I'm going to leave this project for today and think about something different I'll work on tomorrow.
Peace,
Kurt
