Persistence of Time

In talking about "persistence of time", jacky wrote:

>This is just incredible! Fantastic percussion work. It sounds as if
>the percussion may be a part of the tuned texture. Right - wrong?

Thanks - and right - the rhythmic bed is basically a 3 against 2 pattern,
and is integrated into the melodic/harmonic portions in the
sense that (more or less) everything occurs on elements of
the 3 by 2. Actually, some voices are 3 by 2, others 4 by 3,
others 6 by 4, others 8 by 3, etc, but the point is that all
of these provide accents and variations on the underlying 3 by 2.

>How do you do it Bill?

I'll take this question literally.

The basic rhythmic motif was created with a Max program -
superimposing the various rhythms and playing them in random 12-tet
pitches. When I decided on the orchestration, I FFT'd the
timbres of the sounds (many of them quite inharmonic)
and then re-tuned using a variant of the adaptive method
(in this case a Matlab program) so as to maximize
consonance (actually, to minimize the dissonance)
at each time instant.

Bill Sethares