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Passing Moments

by Nick Bates

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Passing Moments 01:19:10
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This is a recording of an installation-esque sound art piece I created when I was in grad school. The name has gone through a couple of phases, from the awful "The Current Now" to the much better "Passing Moments". This is a Bandcamp-only release since this isn't really supposed to be recorded music like my numerous other projects. If anything, this recording shows that this piece existed at some point in time, even if I don't manage to get it installed anywhere.

The idea was to create an ever-changing soundscape that changed, well, very slowly. I was inspired by a quote when finding sources for my master's thesis project. From the Prologue of Void Front Press's "Sustain // Decay", the quote reads, "All genres (all life, all differentiation) can be imagined as mere clusters of patterns of iterations of momentary deviations from the drone." I simplified it a little bit, though. Here, the sudden noise from bells or guitars are the momentary deviations from the sine waves they sit on. The sine waves are constantly changing, too. The max patch that drives the piece randomly selects a number of the sixteen voices to start changing frequency over a predetermined amount of time (usually upwards of 20-30 minutes). The effect is that you get very slowly changing intervals which provide context for the randomly selected pitches of bells, guitar, and piano strikes. Everything is tuned to the harmonic series, with A = 55Hz as the fundamental.

An additional layer of change has the sounds steadily circle around eight speakers setup around the perimeter of a room, with the sudden sounds jumping randomly around those speakers. The stereo recording is vastly inferior to actually being in the space, but headphones do a fair job at faking it.

This piece, if given the proper setup, could continue forever and you would never hear the same thing twice. And, even if it did repeat, would you remember what was repeated? While listening to this, ask yourself, why worry about what you missed when what comes next could be more interesting?

As always, please enjoy.

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released August 18, 2023

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Nick Bates New Jersey

NJ composer of whatever the hell he feels like creating.

Occasionally streams impromptu concerts on Twitch and uploads them to YouTube.

Creator of Tremor Underfoot and 地上.

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