A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of attending a concert of Grisey's "Les espaces acoustiques" at the "Acht Brücken" festival in Cologne. This concert came at a good time for me as for a while I have been re-exploring sound, spectra and overtones in my work. Something I was very interested in at university, but lost track of when I started working more and had my hands full.

So here is a slightly playful approach to it. I played this rather simple piece on the piano with the accompaniment of two short loops of different lengths on the Intruo "Lubadh" playing into Mutable Instruments "Beads". On the big modular system I patched four voices: two Even VCOs into the two BF-22 filters and two oscillators from the Kraftzwerg into the two filters of the Moregasmatron. Each voice has it's own filter cutoff and is amplitude modulated by either an LFO on Maths or Rampage. The voices are patched so that they modulate each other's frequency in this way:

1 → 4

2 → 1

3 → 2

4 → 3

Forming a loop.

I then cut out different parts of the piano recording and transcribed the highest four clearly audible overtones, which turned out to be mostly overtones 4 to 7. I then translated this data into midi notes and played them over the piano recordings.

I think it was interesting, and as I always say (and rarely do), this is something I want to explore more.