yet another note

also re: http://music.columbia.edu/~chris/dissert.html

I should note that there is a continuum in this piece between "perfectly"
and very "imperfectly" tuned material. Thus there are filter and
wave-table based sounds that can be tuned "perfectly" (though they can
also be twisted and distorted into distuned sounds as well), and there are
samples of a deliberately "out-of-tune" piano, that can be tuned close to
a desired exact pitch, but never exactly (because the samples themselves
contain beatings); and finally
a major part of the piece was the use of lots of er. . . "concrete" or
noise sounds, inter-mixed with the more "intentionally pitched" stuff.
Part of the way I made the piece involved a "gestural database engine,"
where I could specify the shape of a musical gesture in various parameters
(for example: some high, sharp attack sounds, followed by long-duration
agitated middle-register sounds, or the like. . .), and the "engine" would
look through a database of musique concrete sounds and find some that fit
the gesture.

Some times I could ask for pitches with these, and it would find a sound
fairly close in pitch to what I wanted. . .

but the point is that the piece moves between different degrees of
"messiness" in regards to the tuning---perhaps a musical parameter that
we're not always aware of, but that informs a lot of great music from
gamelan to string quartet.

C Bailey