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Balloon Drum Music
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Scored for Balloon Drums, Oboe, Flutes, Guitar, and Finger Piano. The piece starts out with a simple conventional sounding 12 tone equal chord progession. But they are not at all what they seem.
microtonal csound prent r
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Microtonal Music by Prent Rodgers. Made with Csound.
I am a composer of music using Microtonal intonation systems, including the Harry Partch Tonality Diamond. These systems draw on Just Intonation, which is different from the normal 12-tone equal temperment that western music has been based on for the last 300+ years. Some of the tuning may sound "off" to modern ears, but if you listen, you will hear sounds that are unique in the world, with a whole world between the 1:1 and the 2:1 octave. The music is created using the tool Csound, which is a publicly available, freely distributed digital signal processing tool with the ability to specify exact tone, timbre, and other characteristics of individual tones with greater specificity than the MIDI standard. All the pieces on this site are built using sample-based instruments from the McGill University Master Sample Library.
Song Info
Genre
Classical • Contemporary
Charts
Peak #6
Peak in subgenre #2
Author
Prent Rodgers
Rights
2005
Uploaded
October 02, 2005
Track Files
MP3
MP3 5.3 MB • 128 kbps • 0:00
Story behind the song
It is scored for Balloon Drums, Oboe, Flutes, Guitar, and Finger Piano. The piece starts out with a simple chord progession for the winds, with finger piano bass, that sounds sort of like this: * Bb major * Eb major * G minor * and so on. When it is played, it sounds like a conventional progression. But in actuality, the chords are from the Partch Tonality Diamond, and their names in Sagittal notation are shown on the blog post at podcast1024.libsyn.com. There are notes in each key that are in common with the next key, and some that are slightly different. Some are off by very small ratios, and at later points in the piece when the flutes and oboe slides from one to another, the slide is unsettling to the non-microtonal ear. For example, in the movement of chords from the B 16/9 major to the D 8/7 major, the B 16/9 goes down by 27:28 to fifth of the D 8/7 chord, which is A 12/7. There's another movement of a 35:36 and a 15:14. Each of these movements are decidedly different from conventional 12 tone equal temperment, whose minor second pitches approximate a 15:16. But even with these movements, the chords sound rather conventional at the start of this piece. When the slides come in, things get more microtonal. The oboe has the ability to be in more than one place at the same time in this piece, or think of it as two oboists. The timbre of the oboe is subject to some alteration by choosing samples that are higher or lower than originally recorded. The result is kind of an English Horn sound, or sometimes like an angry cat. As with most of my pieces, this one has a lot of indeterminacy. Each instrument can choose what to play next, by selecting from many alternative pitch and rhythm sequences. There are programmatic controls that drive the choice of sequences either towards or away from repetition. The basic structure of the piece is a chord progression as a bridge between the longer sections of B 16/9 major. There are lots of triads based on 4:5:6 overtones, or 7:9:11, or slides between the two. These triads alternate in the chords and arpegiations. Other chords take advantage of wider intervals, like the 5:7:11:16, 6:9:13:20, 8:11:18:24, and other quasi fourth-based intervals. The balloon drums are made from a four foot long sewer pipe with a balloon membrane over one end. I recorded one and use Csound to bring it up in pitch. Each note played on the balloon drum is actually 5-10 strikes of the drum separated by a few milliseconds. It gives it a sense of many drummers playing at once.
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simonXAG
Aug 18, 2009
That was really rather cool. At first you think it is going to be boring, then weird, but then you settle in to it and enjoy the music on its own terms.