HEXANY FANTASY - a new piece, free for downloading or streaming

Here's a new piece!  Called, in polite mixed company, among friends,  "Hexany Fantasy: While reading "The Children's Grimoire," Bluebearry and Yellow Hippo stumble into the realm of the ever-evolving Hexanies, encountering the sonically embodied memories of those who envisioned whole other servings of tapioca."

For the past several months, I've been working with apps on the iPad, watching with delight as various apps get more and more powerful, allowing one to make experimental music in real time on a very small touch-screen based tablet computer.  Recently, I was asked by Marcus Hobbs to be a beta tester on his new app, Wilsonic, which, when completed (release date - sometime in northern Summer 2014), will allow one to play with some of Ervin Wilson's scale formations in real time.  Testing has continued, and over the past couple of weeks, I've been working with the Hexany screen of the app.  A Hexany is one of Wilson's formations.  It takes 4 factors - usually low-numbered harmonics, but not necessarily - and by taking every combination of two of those factors, makes a six-note scale.  If you do use low numbered harmonics, you'll notice that some of the scales are very consonant, while others are moderately dissonant.  In this piece, I made a progression of scales, and improvised with them, changing only the fourth factor, once a minute.  (The progression is shown below.)

(This is a screen grab of the Wilsonic app Hexany page.  Please note, since this is a very much pre-release beta version of the software, the appearance of this page and its capabilities are very much subject to change.)

 

Using Audiobus2, I connected Wilsonic to the Crystalline effects app, using a custom version of the Reverb 6 algorithm, and then routed that into Cubasis, the iPad version of Steinberg's Cubase.  Panning and mixing was done in Cubasis.  Following my harmonic progression, I improvised three tracks, each 19 minutes long.  I didn't listen to any of the other tracks while improvising each track, so the resulting mix was a surprise to me.  

Here's a screenshot of the Audiobus2 patch.

This is what the settings in Crystalline look like.  Notice the Audiobus2 control panel at the bottom.

And this is a screenshot of Cubasis.  The three tracks of the piece are shown at the top.

Although my performing has some rough spots - intentionally so, as I'm using a touch-screen keyboard for the first time - I was very happy with the results.  This was both technically, because this was the first piece made just within the iPad that I was totally happy with, and also aesthetically, because I found the sounds in the piece very beautiful.

So, here's the piece.  You can stream it below, or you can download it here. If you're on an iPad or similar device that doesn't support the flash player, just click HERE. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

And here's the "score" - the list of Hexanies used in the piece, and the times when you should change to a new one.

The progression

TIME - HEXANY

0:00      1-3-9-18

1:00      1-3-9-17

2:00      1-3-9-15

3:00      1-3-9-13

4:00      1-3-9-18

5:00      1-3-9-19

6:00      1-3-9-21

7:00      1-3-9-23

8:00      1-3-9-25

9:00      1-3-9-27

10:00     1-3-9-25

11:00     1-3-9-23

12:00     1-3-9-21

13:00     1-3-9-19

14:00     1-3-9-18

15:00     1-3-9-13

16:00     1-3-9-15

17:00     1-3-9-17

18:00     1-3-9-18

At the beginning of each minute, change the term D in the Hexany page in the Wilsonic app to get a different scale.