Thursday, February 5, 2009

Meditations in tintinnabulation


meditation in tintinnabulation from Tetramorph on Vimeo.

Back in November (2008) I wrote some words of respect about Arvo Pärt and his compositional technique of "tintinnabulation." At the conclusion of that post I proposed a possible application for the monome that would be based directly upon that technique. I started a discussion about it in the monome community forum. Stretta responded and put together "tintinnabulome" in max/msp - without even having his monome with him. So this post is also a brief word of respect to Stretta: Thanks for all that you give so freely of your own creativity.

Now, as you may recall, occular gave us a beautiful Christmas carol last season with Stretta's realization of my brainstorm.

Since then dadek has done a couple of really beautiful meditations with tintinnabulome:

And also:
I find these truly beautiful. So I worked on my own tintinnabular meditation, some results of which are found in the video embedded at the top of the post. Although not as beautiful as dadek's, I am happy with it, and with the joy I had in producing it. Never mind that my dog is barking at the end. We can't all have meditative experiences at the same time, I suppose!

I hope it is meditative for you as well. Please share with me what you think. Thanks for reading, and thanks for the encouragement.

2 comments:

  1. I hadn't spent any time looking into this app until today, and can honestly say that I am blown away by it, it seems to be one of those things that creates complexities by its simplicity if that makes any sense at all.

    I thought both your, and dadek's expressions using it were beautiful, and very inspiring.

    I often struggle for inspiration of late, so I think this app appears to be perfect for helping me find those inspirational building blocks to create new tracks, I'm looking forward to trying it out this weekend.

    I think to record the output via midi, and then create layers with additional instances would make for a beautiful and intricate piece of work.

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  2. I am so thankful that this app is so appealing to many and that it is helping you, Auditory Canvas, in particular, to get back in touch with your creativity. I like the layered midi idea, I may try it myself!

    It is great to go from brainstorm to a really wonderful realized app. And I am not even a programmer! Or a professional musician. What a blessing to be a part of so great a community - here's to you, monome.

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