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Hey Loopers,
has anyone of you experience with what Douglas Hofstadter calls "strange
loops" in a musical sense?
Hofstadter uses the mentioned term in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach for
strange recursions of any kind. He starts by giving an example of canons by
JS Bach which progress chromatically, i.e. when one voice of the canon has
been played once, it ends one tone higher and is thus repeated the second
time transposed, and so on...
While working on my next heavily loop-based album "Sauflieder Band 2:
Extreme Ambient Terror", I got the idea that the inherent pitch-shifting
possibilities of the Repeater would make it easy hardware-wise to do this
kind of thing.(anyone else can of course do exactly the same what I'm about
to describe using another looper and an external pitch shifter...)
*** WARNING !!! LONG MUSIC THEORY BABBLE AHEAD ***
One of my studies is based on a harmonic progression which, starting in the
key of C, goes like this:
Cm D7 Fm6 G7 Cm7 Ebm7 F#7 F
taking a look at the functions of these chords in a C scale (and ignoring
for one moment 7ths and 6ths et al), we have:
t DD s D t Dp DS(sub) S
(t tonic, d dominant, s subdominant, p parallel, g antiparallel, sub
substitution, uppercase=major, lowercase=minor))
This works ok as a strange plagal turnaround (which GF handel did like a
lot) in C key. But if we take a look at the last chords and assume for one
moment we're in Bb minor, this becomes:
...dd s DD(sub) D
...so we can append here the start of the loop transposed two semitones
downward. But there's more: Assume we have the loop running in reverse, the
first chord is F, so let's assume for one moment we're in the key of F, the
functions of the second half (= the first half reversed) become:
...DD t sG d
which is ok. But if we again do the analysis in the key of G (which is
incidentially F transposed one step up), we get:
...T dG D s
...and again, we can append the start (=the end) of the loop transposed two
semitones upwards.
So we have a loop which we can either run as is, and it makes sense
harmonically, or we can "think differen" and just pitch down two steps for
each round, and after seven rounds, we're back in the key of C. And if we
change our mind halfway, we just kick in reverse, and progress back up.
Another step I took was using polyphonic lines which tend to transpose
themselves (in the Bach way) and even make sense when combined in different
transpositions. Take the following passive theme (=a bassline):
C Bb D C E Ab C
This is based on a wholetone scale, so the conventional harmonic functional
theory does not apply in exactly the same way. Still, we have at the end a
progression which is centered around Bb, and if seen reversed at the end
(=the beginning) an ascending line leading to D. So again, we can use this
loop to transpose down in one and up in the other direction. What makes the
use of the scale extra appealing is the fact that the notes of the scale
stay the same no matter where I transpose, thus, I can use a steady active
theme (=a melody) and have it running forwards and backwards and do
similair
tricks.
Of course, it is also interesting here to use an active theme which does
similair things. One I worked out transposes upwards, and I have two copies
of it on adjacent tracks of the repeater, on of them recorded forward and
one reverse. So the bassline and the melody either transpose in opposite
directions (forward) or in unisono (backward). What makes this a little bit
tricky is the modus operandi: I currently use a FCB1010 to transpose the
bassline to its 7 discrete levels and to switch into reverse, at the same
time sending mute/unmute commands to the two tracks containing the melody
forward and reverse, and use a keyboard to control the two melodies' pitch.
So much of thinking aloud for today...and here back to my question: has any
of you ever done anything similair, and perhaps is able to offer some
useful
hints (either for use of equipment to realize this stuff, or, more
importantly, hints for composing this way).
And if you didn't do anything like this before...look forward to my next
CD!
Rainer
Rainer Straschill
Moinlabs GFX and Soundworks - www.moinlabs.de
digital penis expert group - www.dpeg.de
The MoinSound Archives - www.mp3.com/moinlabs