Maturana

Lately I’ve been tinkering again with my Little Grundgestalts. I have given a lecture about my “method”, and I have written a paper that I submitted to The Journal of New Music Research. Moreover, I have started collaborating with a great Chilean researcher who introduced me to the wonderful “modelling language” of Chemical Organization Theory. I expect to tell more here about this wonderful new journey soon.

Something else recently happened too — regrettably, something very saddening. Humberto Maturana, the great Chilean scientist, passed away.

Apart from his concept of autopoiesis, I know really too little about Maturana’s work — I will start studying soon. Before doing that, though, today I felt the urge to experiment again with my Little Grundgestalts. This post reports about this little experiment of mine.

My starting point

I first asked my algorithm to tell me the sound of the string “Maturana”. In other words, I fed string “Maturana” into my Beggar-my-Neighboursimulator, produced a set of orbits, and converted them into music. The result was this fragment:

First fragment of “Maturana”

I liked this very first output; I said to myself, “this element should appear twice, and have a little conclusion.” So I tried with the string “Maturana Maturana Varela”. The result was much better!

Second fragment of “Maturana”

This motivated me to continue with it.

New elements

I took a very simple direction: I launched the following script:

randperm -i Maturana -n 40 -x

and collected fourty random permutations of string “Maturana”. Then I added at the beginning and at the end the string “Maturana Maturana Varela”. And once again I fed the result into my Beggar-my-neighbour simulator.

The result was quite interesting; though it was the single voices that caught my attention. When played by a piano, they all seemed to me quite interesting. So I decided to… play with them, a little bit. Let me call those voices M1, M2, and M3.

I took M1 and played it. Then I used the second fragment as if it were a second voice of a canon, starting around 5s171ms. The result was surprisingly convincing. I then overlapped the whole M1 again, starting around 9s146ms. I also applied M1, though played by timpani.

At the same time I applied a fragment from M2. The whole M2 was then overlapped at 55s632ms, and M3 at 1m24s630ms.

The three voices (with M3 this time, played by a clarinet) are then overlapped around 1m51s330ms. M1 is also played by timpani here.

This screenshot summarizes how the voices of “Maturana” were combined together.

Conclusive remarks

In this post I wanted to describe in more detail the “compositional” process that I adopt when creating my little Grundgestalts. The example I took is “Maturana”, a track from my album “Ley Lines”: