Ringing, chiming, tolling, dissolving, cascading, warping, shattering, rising anew.
When I dissolve a sound into its constituent partials, how does its character change? I can take an ostensibly solid timbre and shape it, mold it, splash it. I started this composition with the end result, a deep, resonant chime that I constructed with a combination of sine, triangle, sawtooth, and square waves on each partial. Placing this chime at the end of the work, I spend the buildup of the work introducing each partial one by one in a random order, with each constituent waveform detuning and fluctuating in amplitude independently. Harmonies emerge from the swirling texture as more and more partials assemble and the fluctuations themselves grow wider, until the ringing cascades of sound coalesces into their final form, a deep, low chime emerging from the swirling mass.
As with live algorithmic sound, this rendering is only one possibility. With the partials arriving in a random order, the harmonies that emerge as the final timbre assembles manifest uniquely every time.
