Exploring the unrevealed world through Music
Deep inspiration, and learning from the world of sonic form
Exploring the unrevealed world through Music
Deep inspiration, and learning from the world of sonic form
CONSONANCE AS COLLABORATOR
Music is the way I understand the world
Just as geometry is the study of harmonic relationships in physical space, music is the study of harmonic relationships in time. The physical vibration of the air around us, and our eardrums in that medium, conveys to us a nested hierarchy of information.
While my study of music, and the music that I play are absolutely essential in my understanding of pattern in the world, and of how the nuanced inquiry of cognition can reveal it - this is a home, not for my own musical creations, but for the study in inquiry of harmony itself.
Elements of Harmonic Form
Harmony
Simple numerical relationships are at the heart of musical consonance. The simpler the musical relationship, the more easily our ear can process it, and hence hear it as a pleasing sound.
Frequency
Our experience as human beings is defined by rhythm. The pulse of our heart beat, the rise and fall of our breath, the subtle tide of our brain waves. Learning the foundations of how we percive frequency in our bodies is foundational to a wholistic understanding of who we are.
Form
Where geometry is a set of harmonic relationships held in space, and revealed all at once. Music, unfolded through the passage of time, is the exploration of harmonic relationships in succession. The motion of these relationships through the greater web acoustic possibility is where the power of the form lies.
Discovering our world through sound.
In my university studies, I wound up in a course on the physics of music…. What I learned there, became a foundational framework for not just how I understood musical phenomena, but all the physical phenomena in the world.
Paired with 5 years of private study with Canadian composer Bradshaw Pack, where I studied the canon of Western classical music - I discovered music’s formal, and physical structure created a compelling lens for understanding our manifest world.
Music isn’t just a medium of expression. It is a mode of inquiry into the world, tied most deeply to our cognitive function.
Using the tools of listening and perception we can parse a dimension of physical relationships that aren’t spatial - and uncover the language of harmonic proportion in number.
Compositions
Inspired by my love of Post-Rock acts like Mogwai, Godspeed You Black Emperor and Sigur Ros - here’s a 2006 piece I wrote and recorded - designed to create an acoustic space for the listener to inhabit.
Exploring the phenomena of standing waves and their interactions - Interference Patterns (for Thomas Young) is a piece composed in 2007, that follows the same theme unfolding through polyrhythmic time signatures based on the fibbonaci sequence.
Colleagues, Inspirations & Collaborators:
Cymatics
Jacob Adlington - Journey of Curiosity
A wonderful array of cymatic photographs, by a talented Australian artist.
John Telfer - Cymatic Music
A wonderful exploration of the phenomenon, including images of 3D cymatics in bubbles.
Harmony of the Spheres
Dr. Kelly Snook - Concordia
Dr. Snook’s many year project to create a scientific and musical instrument to explore the cosmos.
Hartmut Warm - Signature of the Celestial Spheres
Picking up the work of Kepler some 4 centuries later, Warm has put together the most robust set of resources on the harmonic relationships of the solar system - a profound inquriy to be unpacked.
Michael Rene - The Art of Harmonics
Using internal sonic inquiry as his technique of exploration, Michael teaches on the relationship of consicousness and acoustic phenomena.
Composition & Investigation
Martin Reisle - Martin Reisle
A long time collaborator, in performance and visual art, Martin still writes some of my favourite moving music.
Bradshaw Pack - Bradshaw Pack
Canadian new music composer, and professor of music theory, history, & counterpoint - my time studying with Pack, and enduring friendship has been central to my musical understanding
The Institute of Harmonics Research - Institute of Harmonics Research
A project dedicated to the investigation of harmonic phenomena across disciplines and through diverse modes of inquiry.
EXPLORE HARMONIC GEOMETRY WITH ME