WATER LESSONS #6 20/2/2022
Here are the tuning notes you will need to tune your glass to play in our Water Meditation Music. Use water to fill your glass to change the pitch of the note.
More water = a lower note.
Once you have tuned your note by ear you could check it using a tuning app on your phone such as ‘LunaTuna’.
This is our accompaniment track made from sine tones (pure tones).
Here is my colour-coding of the pitches of the harmonic series applied to Ervin Wilson’s 1965 diagram ‘The Harmonic Series as a Logarithmic Spiral’. In my colour-coding, I always map red to the fundamental pitch (usually C). I then divide the 256 increments of the RGB colour spectrum by the size of each interval from the fundamental.
My Love of Rainbows
Some of my favourite rainbow coloured things.
Every since I was a little girl I have had a fascination with the colour spectrum. Starting with organising packets of smarties or textas into rainbow order in my early years, I progressed to knitting, crocheting, painting and collaging rainbows in my teenage years. I have many rainbow colour scheme objects from art museum shops, rainbow clothing, a solar powered crystal rainbow maker and I love Rainbow brand chai. So what I am basically saying is I LOVE RAINBOWS!
Rainbow Connection : Collage by Amanda Cole (2017)
‘Waves’, Drawing on the security pattern of an envelope by Amanda Cole (2008)
24-note to the octave just intonation Cube-Tuning by Amanda Cole mapped onto a tuning lattice.
My Love of Microtonal Tuning
My other main interest is microtonal music composition, which generally involves using notes from the harmonic series to create just intonation or spectral tunings. What I love about using microtones is the infinite palette of notes that are available between the cracks of the 12 notes on the piano. Like the limitless hues of the colour spectrum, pitch is a continuum of infinite notes and intervals.
I love microtonal tuning as you can work with whole number ratios found in the harmonic series. These notes can be heard in overtone singing and as harmonics when when divide a string at its fractional points. Conceptually I see the harmonic series as being connected with nature and the piano tuning as being a person-made tuning without the same mathematical purity. The the volume each individual overtone of a particular instrument gives us its timbre. A flute has louder even overtones and a clarinet has louder odd overtones. A microtonally tuned instrument such as a piano can set off new overtone interactions between played notes that you wouldn’t normal hear, changing the familiar piano timbre.
I also love microtonal intervals that are close in pitch as they can make enharmonic scalic steps and interference beats when played together. Basically, what is not to love about microtonal tuning!
Using Coloured Water to Map Unfamiliar Scales
I started to work with colour and microtonal scales as a postgraduate student when I built a custom made 60-glass Microtonal Glass Harmonica, tuned to two octaves of Harry Partch’s 29-note to the octave just intonation scale. I colour coded six sub-scales with food colouring in the water of each glass. The colours helped the percussionists navigate the unfamiliar scales and made the instrument looked really pretty!
Amanda Cole’s ‘Microtonal Glass Harmonica’. Pieces for this instrument have been performed by Joshua Hill, John Dewhurst, Jeremy Barnett, Kim Moyes, Jared Underwood, Bree Van Reyk and myself.
Mapping Microtonal Pitch to Hue
I then moved onto mapping Partch’s 43-note to the octave just intonation scales to make some audio-visual animations in Max/MSP. I divided the colour spectrum into the same proportions as one octave of the scale to get 43 different colours. I mapped the 256 colour hues to the 1200 cents in an octave using the formula:
Hue = interval in cents from fundamental/1200 x 256
In Max/MSP I was able convert the hue values between 0 and 255 into RGB (red, green, blue) value using the swatch object. I also now had a way to map notes of any microtonal scale to RGB colours and vice versa.
43 RGB colours mapped to the Harry Partch’s 43-note to the octave scale.
Melatonin Shift #3 (from the series Time—Feeling Time 2003–06) by Robert Owen
I did experiment with mapping hue-to-pitch using Robert Owen’s ‘Melatonin’ painting as a score. I ‘read’ his painting as columns where the duration of each note was determined by the length of each colour block. My sister Jayne Blake (who did my website logo) did an analysis of each RGB colour in the painting. It was an interesting process but I realised that I wanted to control the musical outcome more. You can listen to the music this painting made on the ‘pieces’ page of my website: Melatonin Shift Audio
Making Light Instruments
My first piece using light and music was ‘Polymetrica’ which was scored for my ‘Programmable Light Metronome’ and percussion quartet. The ‘Programmable Light Metronome’ was made from two strings of Christmas lights that could be programmed through my computer to flash at different tempos. The electronics were made by the father of my percussionist friend John Dewhurst, who was playing in the quartet. Polymetrica explored metric modulations and polyrhythms in music and light.
My next light instrument was made for a recorder duet with coloured light for a concert that was part of the Vivid light festival in Sydney. Recorder players Alana Blackburn and Jo Arnott played an ambient microtonal piece where the frequencies of each note triggered coloured lighting. I used my pitch to RGB hue mapping formula in Max/MSP to convert the live pitches of each instrument into coloured light.
Another light instrument I made was triggered by drums for a piece called ‘Flicker’ that was a one-minute commission for Synergy Percussion’s 40th birthday. In this piece for a quartet of drums, certain light colours were assigned to combinations of players striking notes at the same time. In the excerpt of the score below you can see how blue is mapped to a unison in percussion 2 and 4 and orange is mapped to a unison in percussion 1 & 3. There is a video of this piece here: Flicker Video
Flicker by Amanda Cole for Synergy Percussion. Combinations of unison notes by different players triggered different coloured light. Players 1,2 & 3 = red and players 1 & 4 = yellow.
Colour mapping of RGB Glass Rainbow Maker
RGB Rainbow Glass Maker
The RGB Rainbow Glass Maker instrument was created for the performance of a piece called ‘Bowing Rainbows’ in the Backstage Music series in Sydney in 2019. This piece was also scored for violin and piano strings. The RGB Glass Rainbow Maker has three glasses, tuned to perfect 5ths A (red), G (green) & D (blue), which were chosen as they match three of the open string notes of the violin. Each glass has a contact mic attached that goes into my audio interface and then into my Max/MSP patch on my laptop. The live wine glass notes are used to trigger spectral frequencies of the wine glass notes to create additive synthesis. Food colouring is added to the wine glasses to make a red, green and blue glass that triggers the same colour in light. When two glasses are played at the same time the colours are added together create a new colour. This instrument uses additive light and additive sound synthesis. Last year in the Sydney lockdown I did a one-hour set on this instrument for the online Hibernation Festival. I recently demonstrated this piece for the first composition year students at the Sydney Conservatorium (via Zoom) and managed to do some filming that you can now watch on YouTube.
The next version of this instrument will add percentages of red, green and blue based on the volume of each glass played to create even more RGB colours!
Amanda Cole with her RGB Rainbow Glass Maker
Red, Green and Blue glasses that have contact mics attached to trigger coloured lights and electronic music.
Colours the RGB Rainbow Glass Maker can make : Red, Magenta (red + blue), Blue, Cyan (green + blue), Green and Yellow (red + green). .
Spectral Microtonal Pitch-to-Hue Mapping
I have recently come up with this pitch-to-hue mapping for overtones of the harmonic series. In the diagram below I have mapped harmonics 1-23 and have shown the colour scheme for different scales. This spectral mapping could be extended up the harmonic series to get more colours. I am yet to make a work with this mapping but I think it could work well for a new wine glass piece or an interactive audio-visual vocal composition.
News this month is that I have a brand new choral piece called Passion Chorale and I am a finalist in two categories for the APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards!
For the second year in a row I was a participant in the N.E.O. Voice Festival led by the amazing Los Angeles based David Harris, Laurel Irene and Fahad Siadat. The festival was online again which was great for me being stuck in lockdown in Sydney. The theme for the ExplOratorio concert this year was ‘The Passions’. I was initially looking at links between consonance/dissonance and emotion but that topic is huge so I decided to rethink. I then found inspiration in an article about Bach’s ‘Passions’ on the ABC Classic FM’s Facebook page around Easter time. I decided to take Bach’s famous Passion melody and do my own setting in just intonation tuning. I especially wanted to bring out certain overtones by using specific IPA vowels but that also proved to be quite a challenge to research and realise. I was actually amazed at the final result with quite a lot of the overtones in the melody popping. You can hear Passion Chorale on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuFAe6d5GXg
My piece SATB choral piece Singing in Tune with Nature from last year’s N.E.O. Voice Festival is a finalist in this year’s APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards in the choral category. Here is a list of this year’s finalists: https://www.apraamcos.com.au/about/supporting-the-industry/awards/art-music-awards-2021#_173854
You can listen to Singing in Tune with Nature on YouTube here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUIEXv3RFQU
Oracle Chamber for bass flute, baritone saxophone and sine tones is also a finalist in the APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards. This piece was commissioned, workshopped and performed by Lamorna and James Nightingale. You can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHC80EQ4TGk (13:20 minutes into the recital).
More about these three pieces including their program notes can be found on the ‘pieces’ page of my website. Scores for Singing in Tune with Nature and Oracle Chamber are available for purchase through the Australian Music Centre website.
The APRA AMCOS Art Music will be held virtually on the 24th of August.
I am currently doing Jacob Adler’s ‘Microtonality Crash Course’, which is an 8 week course delving into just intonation tuning. I have been working with microtonal tuning for years now but this course covers areas I want to know more about including tuning latices and Indian music. The teacher and other participants are in the USA and Canada so we meet on Zoom each week for a lecture and get homework to do that is submitted through Google Classrooms. This week the assignment was to make a small piece or improvisation using a 3-limit tuning. This simply means that we were only allowed to make scales out of the naturally occurring fifth between the 2nd and 3rd harmonic in the harmonic series. You find this pure 5th by dividing a string into thirds and playing the harmonic by touching the node. These days with modern technology, microtonal intervals found in the harmonic series can be played using software and MIDI interfaces.
For my 3-limit piece I used a Pythagorean scale and made I short piece by improvising on my MIDI keyboard that was triggering the scale I had programmed in Ableton Live. The Pythagorean scale is a made from a sequence of twelve just intonation fifths (each fifth is notated as 3/2). The 3/2 just intonation 5th is larger than the 5th found on our modern day pianos. When you make a circle of 5ths with the 3/2 fifth, the circle doesn’t close. All of the 5ths except one are perfectly consonant, which is called the ‘wolf 5th’. I used the off sounding wolf fifth as the starting point for my little piano piece. I loved the sound of the dissonant wolf fifth compared to the other consonant fifths you find in the Pythagorean scale.
Yesterday on New Years Eve I had a last workshopping session with bass recorder extraordinaire Alicia Crossley. My piece has an electronic music part which of course has some sine tones in it. I have branched out a bit in this piece by also including triangle waves and tuned noise. I am happy with the way the recorder blends in with these electronic music timbres.
I didn’t initially realise that the recorder can’t play dynamics like the flute can. It is just basically on and off when it comes to the envelope of each note. I did however discover some new techniques on the bass recorder when Alicia demonstrated them for me including singing whilst playing, f.v. (enharmonic trills) and moving from a note to a breath sound. These techniques have all made their way into my piece.
I am one of a selection of female Australian composers that Alicia has commissioned to write a new piece for her album she will record in early 2021. This is an exciting project and I can’t wait to hear the other pieces. Go Alicia!
Amanda Cole and Alicia Crossley
Making some final changes to the new piece.
'Singing in Tune with Nature' is by brand new SATB choir piece written for this year’s N.E.O. Voice Festival. Written in a 14-note-to-the-octave just intonation scale exploring vocal overtones piece might sound like throat singing. The program note is below:
‘Singing in Tune with Nature’ aims to draw attention to the beauty and possibilities of singing overtones that are natural to the human voice. Using just intonation tuning, each sung interval comes from the harmonic series rather than the twelve notes found on the piano. The singing techniques and microtonal tuning used are a metaphor for appreciating and focusing in on our natural environment.
The scrolling score made by the N.E.O. voice festival that I sing one of the alto parts can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUIEXv3RFQU
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The N.E.O. Festival was founded to celebrate the expansive possibilities of the voice and educate creative artists on cutting-edge vocology research to inspire the creation of new musical works. Started by VoiceScienceWork (Laurel Irene and David Harris) and See-A-Dot Music Publishing (Fahad Siadat), the festival is an opportunity for curious and innovative musicians to explore adventurous new music as composers and performers in a supportive community environment.
I am currently working on a new piece that has an electronic music accompaniment made out of sequenced sine tone interference beats. I made the accompaniment to Vibraphone Theories this way. I would love to do an hour-long electronic music piece using sequenced interference beats. Here are some pretty screen shots!
Sequenced Sine Tone Interference Beats
Sequenced Sine Tone Interference Beats
My most recent A Galaxy of Suns gig was 'The Altitude Project' at Linden Observatory in the Blue Mountains in NSW. The native bush land setting was stunning and the heritage listed Linden Observatory built by amateur astronomer Ken Beams in the 1940's was great to see. http://lindenobservatory.com.au/
We set up 6 speakers which each played 1/6 of the stars for the 360 degree horizon. The stars were sonified as live as twinkly percussion samples. The weather was a bit grim unfortunately with drizzle most of the day whilst we were setting up. Despite the weather our sound installation worked out very well and sounded great in the bush setting. There will be some audio from this gig up on this site soon.
One of the 6 speakers used to play the stars at Linden Observatory
Amanda Cole setting up the sound for A Galaxy of Suns at Linden Observatory
Picnic in the slighting wet weather at 'Altitude Now' - Linden Observatory.