A Dance of Pattern: Towards New Styles of Auditory and Visual Composition.

A Dance of Pattern: Towards New Styles of Auditory and Visual Composition.

 

The arpeggio is the presentation of a chord over time. As the ear perceives different frequencies presented in temporal succession of one another, the listener’s mind synthesizes the parts into one, consistent narrative: the chord. It is by avenue of this awareness-over-time that C, E, and G, played one note at a time at a rapid tempo, (for instance, at 120 beats per minute, one note per beat) invoke the quality of a C Major Chord. Yet we all know that such a quality can be invoked all at once. Were the three pitches to be played simultaneously, either on a guitar or a piano, or by three separate vocalists or instrumentalists, each producing a different note in unison, the effect would be of a C Major Chord, yet it would sound relatively “in-your-face” and “blockish” because it would require less of the listener’s personal imagination in order to interpret it.

A similar process may be observed visually in the phenomenon of Depth Perception. When I was a child, I owned a toy that was a pair of “3-D Goggles”. A special disc could be inserted into a slot within the machine; this disc contained semi-transparent, coloured panels with images from popular cartoon movies I had watched previously. A special trigger which rested at the top right-hand side of the Goggles allowed me to rotate this disc at one slide at a time whilst looking through the lenses. Each slide was represented by two nearly-identical panels, positioned at opposite ends of the same axis on the wheel, and the Goggles’ lenses allowed me to view the panels simultaneously as though they were two different perspectives of the same image; this created the Illusion of Depth, hence three dimensions. The toy required no electricity, no programming, no artificial light source or digital content. It was purely the science and magic of optics.

A toy xylophone may be considered the sonic equivalent of this toy. It requires no batteries and no electrical source; a toddler can use it. So long as the toddler does not attempt to eat the mallet, which is usually attached inextricably to the frame of the instrument, the toddler may be amused for minutes on end by the sounds of four tones played at different times, entirely according to player input. The magic lies not, however, only in each isolated note. As the toddler begins to develop the faculty of memory, the capacity to hear three notes as one melody becomes possible, especially if those notes, like C, E, and G, for example, already comprise a Chord. Just as the “illusion of Depth” is created by the juxtaposition of two panels, separated only by physical space, so it is that the
“illusion of Harmony” is produced by the juxtaposition of different pitches, separated only by temporal space, i.e. “time”.

Recently, I have had my world restored to its former, dreamlike splendor by the acquisition of a new pair of glasses. These glasses were tailored to the specific deficiencies in my eyeballs, for which I assume no blame.

To take my dog out on a nightly walk became a treat. Whereas previously an airplane flying overhead would be registered as a series of blurs, changing colour in a fixed sequence of consecutive phases, I could now make out the plane’s wings, each highlighted by a rich, golden gem, and the red and green hues that would ordinarily simply “drown out” the golden blur in semi-regular intervals (semi-regular precisely because it would take my mind a moment to process changes in a moving object miles overhead, each time to varying degrees of “accuracy”) now appeared as very specific parts of the aeroplane that would come alive at very precisely synchronized moments, not unlike a percussion ensemble playing a very delicate series of xylophone arpeggios in a composition by Steve Reich. One might say that, whereas previously I heard only the muddied reverb of those arpeggios, forming the impression of a chord, now I could hear the individual notes, presented separately but, as a result, clearly. The two golden gems were effectively two “drones” sustaining the same pitch in different octaves, whereas the blinking lights were presenting the other two legs of the triad in very articulate rhythmic succession. Combining these elements over time produces an effect at once sensorily crisp and imaginatively captivating.

Yet what hovered overhead almost paled in brilliance to what lay before me. Many nights my dog and I would pass a tree that had become familiar to me in childhood, for behind it lay a corner where two walls of the adjacent house met, one belonging to the garage and the other part to the partition which partially enclosed the patio. This corner was the Easternmost “node” that we had designated as a “safe zone” for one of our night-time games of tag. In later age, I bewailed that my sense of wonder had left me with regards to this sheltered alcove, presumably because I was too old (and not yet old enough) to keep playing this peculiar game, creeping around the patios of my neighbours. Yet now it became clear to me, as did its implications.

Up until this point, the sight of the corner had been reduced to a blur. All blurs are devoid of the perception of Depth; the absence of detail provides next to no indication of Distance. All external objects that were outside of my Range of Clarity became equally “far away”, and to compensate for this my mind rendered them all equally “close”, as though they were simply an impressionistic canvas imprinted on the inside of a snow globe. In other words, an object that lay a football field away from me could appear to be as close as an object just outside of my Range of Clarity, for it was no more blurry (though perhaps substantially “smaller”) than a book that was at more than an arm’s length of my eyes, which was more or less the radius of this personal “snow globe” that was my Range of Clarity.

Yet with my new pair of eyes I could now make out the details in the mist. I saw the tree as though I had, for the first time, stopped peering at the tiny panels in my cartoon wheel, slipped them into my 3-D Goggles, and looked through the lenses. What had previously appeared as an Impressionistic Blur was now revealed in layers of detail. Previously, Depth could only be perceived over time, with a concerted effort. If I wished to measure Distance, I would have to traverse that same Distance, at least up until the nearest object (the Tree, most probably and usually) moved out of the Filter of Blur and into the Realm of Clarity. Yet now I could take in the entire three-dimensional scene at once, from one vantage point, and making such a journey would be a treat in that each subpart, already clear, would become enriched, each at its own pace, which was always a derivative of my own chosen pace.

In the previous analogy to music, I likened my former blurriness with a sort of muddied ambience that invoked a chord but with less precision than an arpeggio, and my restored global clarity was analogous accordingly to that same arpeggio. Yet in this more terrestrial example the roles were flipped. The complete image, in all its detail, was less like an arpeggio and more like a block chord, distinct from the aforementioned “ambience” in that there was nothing “muddy” about it. By the same token, if I wished to investigate the chord as a whole, I would have to approach it over time, taking in various elements, like an arpeggio.

This brings me to my Ideal for very precise composition, both sonically and visually:

By coupling Block Chords (as well as chordal ambience and reverb) simultaneously, composers can create a phenomenon known as the Polychord. The effect of this may be quite dissonant, though at times this dissonance may be mitigated by the presentation and representation of various patterns over time. In other words, as the listener becomes familiar with a fundamental pattern, the introduction of new variations upon this pattern, as well as variations upon auxiliary “overlying” patterns, may be experienced as appropriate and “logical” rather than “disruptive”, just as the moderate introduction of evil into a narrative such as The Godfather or Breaking Bad is less shocking than immediate brutality. Similarly, the process of watching a well-meaning character transform into a villain so brutal as to rival his initial adversaries may be likened to the process by which layers of increasing dissonance come to merge with an ambient backdrop of dissonant noise, as in an Industrial Metal composition by Nine Inch Nails or Mick Gordon. Yet more often than not composers elect to avoid dissonance for as long as possible, especially in writing for a conventional audience. Chords that might otherwise form a Polychord are thus sequestered over time in a progression. Yet this is not very different in principle from the transformation of a block chord into an arpeggio, and that fact creates a new opportunity for imaginative and compelling harmonization.

An arpeggio may technically be played at any tempo. Entire ambient works have been produced by simply extending a phrase over abnormal lengths of time. When Michael Giacchino reimagined and recreated John Williams’ “Imperial March” from the original Star Wars trilogy in the stand-alone sequel Star Wars: Rogue One, some listeners only vaguely recognized it as a variation upon the iconic motif, though others, who had been anticipating it for over an hour, were less thrown by its length over time as by the length of time preceding it. When music is presented over time, it is a far more subjective experience, and as such it appears at once more alienating and more intimate. What Giacchino managed to do to artfully disguise the homage, thereby objectively consolidating its subjectively fluidity, was to superimpose a new chord progression (or a new variation upon the existing progression) over the ground bass that served as the bones of the old “Darth Vader” leitmotif. By the same token, an arpeggio need not be played fast in order to be recognized as a chord. It may be played slowly, and it is this flexibility that allows additional chordal material to be superimposed OVER it.

While C, E, and G play on the ground floor, for instance, voices overhead may play A minor, E minor, and G minor, for instance. By this means, what on one level, over time, appears as a Major Chord is overscored by a progression of minor chords. Since the chords A minor, E minor, and G minor contain the notes C, E, and G, respectively, the progression may be considered consonant at any one point in time, though the C Major Chord being presented OVER time would clash (create dissonance) with G minor, though not as much dissonance, ironically, as were the latter chord G Major, though both Major Chords (C and G) inhabit the same pitch collection, of which C is the Tonic (most stable) Chord, and G minor borrows a note (“B flat”) from outside of that collection which “just so happens” to clash less with C than “B Natural” (of that collection, within the “key of C”) does. Similarly, while G minor would clash with either A minor or E minor if presented simultaneously with either, (or worse: both!!) it “follows and flows naturally” from E minor over time, simply because both share a “gender” (“minority”, the quality of “being minor”).

This same pattern may be expanded and atomized even further, however. If we wished to remove block chords altogether from this composition, we might express each of the aforementioned minor chords as arpeggios. Set to a time signature of 9/8, wherein each bar contains nine eighth-notes, we might present A minor, E minor, and G minor consecutively as eighth-note triplets, each one hovering over a bass note that is three eighth-notes (notated as a “dotted quarter-note”, three-halves of an ordinary quarter-note, which is twice the length of an ordinary eighth-note) in length. In this fashion, we would express the C Major Triad as a bass arpeggio that is three times as slow as (or a third of the speed of) the Minor Triad Arpeggios overhead. This juxtaposition allows for as many as four different chords, ordinarily irreconcilable and dissonant with respect to one another at any one time, to be evoked through only two lines, appearing as no more than two different pitches at a time but involving as many as seven different notes, from multiple keys, over the course of time.

Yet this juxtaposition is even more mysterious than I have already intimated. Since A minor and E minor both contain the note “E”, it becomes possible for that note to act as a “pivot tone” between A minor and E minor. Expressed as a single note at a single moment in time, it may “belong” to EITHER A minor OR E minor, and this is to say nothing yet of the numerous other chords that use “E” in numerous other pitch collections. Just as matter may be perceived as either a wave or a particle, according to Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, so it is that an “E” may be either the Root of E minor (or E Major, for that matter, in other pitch collections, such as the “key of E”) or as the Fifth of A minor (or A Major, also outside of our current pitch collection, though not outside of the “key of E”, just as the “key of A” contains E Major). By the same token, Walter White, the “hero” of Breaking Bad, may often be interpreted as the villain “Heisenberg”, whose name is an homage to this same principle of ambiguity; Bryan Cranston, who depicts both the hero and his villainous alter-ego, is a sort of “pivot” between two radically opposed identities. While E minor and A minor (as well as their parallel Major equivalents) are not as “radically opposed” as C Major and G minor, as intimated, even C Major and G minor have a pivot tone in “G”, so that where the C Major Arpeggio meets the G minor Arpeggio we might even have them meet at the same exact pitch: for instance, “middle G”, or 384 waves per second in “just” intonation.

Furthermore, C Major in itself shares two notes each with BOTH A minor and E minor; more specifically, A minor contains C and E, which are the first two notes in our bassline, while E minor contains E and G, which are the last two notes of our bassline. This means that the transition between A minor and E minor is not clearly delineated until either “A”, “C”, “G”, or “B” (Natural) appears, the former two belonging only to A minor in this dichotomy (“A”, specifically, only belongs to that one chord out of our set of four) and the latter two belonging not to A minor but to E minor. Since the bassline underscoring these two chords plays only C and E, and since “E” belongs to both A minor and E minor, once the “C” resolves and the bassline turns to “E”, it may be impossible to tell whether A minor or E minor is the overlying chord, and so long as the “B” (Natural) is omitted this ambiguity may remain until either the bass or the treble plays “G”; even this “G”, as intimated, may belong EITHER to E minor OR to G minor, so it is not until the appearance of either B Natural or B flat that the listener may draw a definite line, and if the “G” is first introduced in the bassline, that line may in itself be subject to the illusion of ambiguity, since the “G” in the bassline also completes the C Major Chord, which is so dissonant with G minor, as previously intimated, that the appearance of G minor may appear too farfetched to register, just as in a dissonant polychord that is presented over time. On top of ALL of that, the “G” acts as the “minor seventh” of the A minor Triad, so the “G” may act as an unstable but jazzy and beautiful pivot tone between G minor and A minor, now heard as an “A minor Seventh”.

When I beheld the sheltered alcove of my youth with my new pair of eyes, I saw the entire scene in all its former Depth. I beheld it as a single, gorgeous block chord, so that if I’d had the hand to paint it I might have produced a still life that would have rivaled Cezanne’s fruits. Were I to have returned alone, without my dog, to creep into that familiar corner, at once cozy and bracing, I would have seen this Depth modulate much as a shifting soundscape; as the Tree came into closer proximity and intricacy of detail, it would have been like a single violin string quivering, its timbre unconcealed by its mounting volume. As I would have ventured further in, beyond that same Tree I would have perhaps made out the stucco patterns in the wall, previously cloaked in shadow and distance. Just as pivot tones resolve to make room for new tones to glimmer in new forms of consonance, so my eyes would have perceived deeper levels of mystery by moving beyond even that which the first “chord” or “still-life” had revealed from a distance. Yet had it been one night prior, were I armed only with my old glasses of nearly three years, I would have only been able to piece this scene together from creeping into it, and the pattern my mind would have produced would have been an entirely different chord than the one I had heard in childhood, as distinct from this detailed interactive three-dimensional portrait as C Major is distinct from G minor in music.

I recently read that when the eye sees it only takes in a small stream of light at a time. What we perceive as complete, vivid images are nothing more than a collage of quick, pointed glimpses assembled by the brain. In this sense, the entire process of finding the node, identifying it, considering it, and then running into it, all within the course of a single game of tag played at night, may be expressed not unlike a series of notes, each heard as either a particle or a wave, put together moment by moment, synthesized over longer moments into a whole that not merely surpasses the sum of its parts but that, fundamentally, can only be divided into “parts” for the sake of utility. It is precisely this interplay between utility and humility, between the illusion of certainty and the imminence of uncertainty, that makes Human Life, as a dance between the senses and the Imagination, worth living. That is both its staunchest science and its most absorbing magic. That comprises the Lifeblood of Art, and those are the bones of the most Artful Life. As Alan Watts had so brilliantly summarized: “Life is a Dance of Pattern.”

[({Dm.R.G.)}]