James Tenney composed For Ann (rising) in 1969 and made several realizations with tape and signal generators. In 1991 I was asked to engineer a compilation of his early computer and electronic music, “Selected Works 1961-1969″. Instead of using one of the tape versions of For Ann (rising), we decided to realize it digitally in Csound. Jim described the piece to me over the phone. The piece consists of 240 sine wave sweeps, each of which lasts 33.6 seconds long and rises 8 octaves (4.2 seconds per octave). Each sweep has a trapezoidal amplitude envelope which rises from 0.0 to 1.0 gain in the first two octaves, stays at 1.0 for the 4 mid octaves, and drops from 1.0 to 0.0 for the top two octaves of each sweep. A new sweep starts every 2.8 seconds. The Csound orchestra and score was simply:
sr=44100
kr=44100
ksmps=1
instr 1
kf expon 40, 33.6, 10240
ka linseg 0, 8.4, 2000, 16.8, 2000, 8.4, 0
a1 oscil ka, kf, 1
out a1
endin
----
f1 0 16385 10 1
i1 0 42
i1 2.8 42
i1 5.6 42
and so on.....
The tuning difference between each successive sweep is a 12tet minor 6th. I have recently put together a new realization of For Ann (rising) in Pure Data. I am using metro, delay and vline to generate the sweeps in this version, as these objects (unlike many objects in PD) are sample accurate, and should give consistent tuning accuracy. Also for this realization, I have added the capability to perform the piece with the original 12tet minor 6th, a just 1.6 ratio, and a golden mean (phi) ratio between successive sweeps.

The PD patch is available here, for those who want to hear the piece.

As requested – my pitchdelay drone shimmer feedback instrument
http://musicweb.ucsd.edu/~tre/172/shimmer.pd
FINAL PROJECT MUSIC 172
DUE THURSDAY JUNE 7TH
Create a 4 to 6 minute piece for 4 instruments with programming hidden in subpatches. Create front panel parameter controls (including instrument volume).
1 – Have 2 presets for each instrument which have distinct timbres and are used in the piece
2 – Use one or more envelope generators or LFOs in each instrument
3 – Use technique/s from the five areas covered this quarter in each instrument:
a – overlap add, looping, granulation
b – filtering
c – spatialization
d – spectral techniques
e – analog (subtractive) synthesis
4 – Present in class on Thurs, June 2nd or Tues, June 7th 3-6PM
5 – grading based on thorough understanding, quality of programming, quality of sound and originality.
Download the University of York externals from here.
Applications of the FFT
http://musicweb.ucsd.edu/~tre/172/w7.zip
the patches from analog synth week… a sortof arpish moogish thing
http://musicweb.ucsd.edu/~tre/172/w5.zip
start by opening w5a4-synth.pd
ASSIGNMENT #3 MUSIC 172
DUE THURSDAY MAY 19
1 – Create two or more instruments that use spectral techniques
2 – Use filtering or convolution
3 – Use one of the following techniques
- phase manipulation
- pitch shifting
- time stretching
4 – Modulate the parameters during a “note” with an array envelope or <vline>
5 – Use some externally processed sound from SoundHack, Mammut or BruteFIR
Each item will be graded as follows: 0 – didn’t try, 1 – tried but didn’t succeed, 2 – success, 3 – amazing.
more on filtering – a little bit on convolution
http://musicweb.ucsd.edu/~tre/172/w4.zip