In the following paper, I will explore unrecorded musics as a site of semantic slippage, and misinterpretation as a path to creativity. I will use Ancient Greek music as my main example, because it is so captivating in its silence; we only have some abstract theories of tuning, but lack recorded realizations. There are many conflicting theories of Ancient Greek music- all are unprovable and some are proven false- but they nevertheless have inspired musicians looking for radical new tuning systems. In transitioning to modern, authors have used ancient theories as a lense to reflect on the present. In examining 20th century representations of Ancient Greece, I extend the theory of unrecorded music to use in electronic music, by abstracting a process of idea diffusion as a tool for further creation. We arrive at the idea of an "ancient electronic music". Also, discussing the process by which modalities are appropriated by decodification is a structural game that may be analogized in circuitry; the pitch bending of precisely (re)tuned theories is like circuit bending.
Walter Benjamin speaks of the "shattering" of modern life into the sampling rate of the film camera, as viewers can focus, myopically, on small imperfections of acted gestures (1936). In recorded sound, the same is true; imperfections in playing and mistunings of played pitches are accepted as a fact and sometimes relished for their personality. Ames, in problematizing comparative musicology in the age of the phonograph, compares it to dissection of a cadaver to examine the internal structure of a music (2003). Ancient performers had no such way to dissect a music or leave it for posterity, and furthermore they thought not of “performing a recording” and the attitude of exemplarity that it implies. Thus, any extant theory was not based on fieldwork, rather focusing on esoteric philosophy or politics. This is the meta-musical material left behind by the Ancient Greeks, and it is a site of slippage for "no one knows truly what Ancient music sounds like," and we are only left with theories and constructs.
Eggar noted in 1930 that “the writing down of music- the visible precipitation” of an invisible thing, was a contradiction that the Greeks found hard to grasp, since music was “drank” from the air (Eggar, 1930). Bach emphasized musical writing, and music theory tomes further supplement this visible language of the music. We lack this sort of "known" lexicon for ancient music, and even the shards of extant texts are open to interpretation; they are thoroughly unwritten.
Like I said, Ancient Greek music was, and is still, unrecorded. One can actually listen to a recording of Bach, because he made a contract of his music; it is both theory and musical score and it requires a known instrument, the clavier, with known tuning. Ancient Greek music is not so contractual; there is no guarantee of a full description, just texts of poetry without musical notation, so it is a site of open musical meaning. When you buy a CD of Ancient Greek music, is a creation of a modern interpreter, who envisioned and realized melodies in tuning systems dug up from dubious sources on instruments that may or may not be authentic. Or maybe you don't realize this and you perceive an "aura" of the Ancient: it sounds like wind in stone ruins, it is solemnity and ceremony, simple and perhaps "modal". Although we know not the truth, for of course there are no recordings, we can suspend disbelief, and let our perception be shaped by the meta-musical texts transmitted by the ancients. For example, Plato wrote ideas on the ceremonial use of organized sound. Pythagoras attempted to theorize the modal tunings of instruments, but in a mystical way that emphasized geometrical harmony at the expense of musical fidelity. Instruments can be reconstructed from pottery paintings, which are stylized to a degree that it is impossible to exactly reproduce the instrument or know the functional use of all its depicted features. There are also "DIY texts" on how to make musical instruments which are equally as difficult to interpret. So, these are the types of meta-musical sources for an ancient musical practice: theories of tuning and instructions for instrument building.
The interesting nature of tunings is due to their lack of a monolithic system such as the twelve tone scale of Bach; theoretical treatises have varying degrees of fidelity to musical tradition, because of their political, mathematical, or aesthetic motivation. The theorists were not musicians, and it does not seem that there was the idea of transcribing melodies. Only an abstract framework of mathematical, ceremonial ratios is passed down to us. It is hard for several reasons to believe that Pythagoras was describing the music from his day, but yet much of our music can still be described as Pythagorean for it uses the distilled “number idea” as its tuning basis.
So you see we have a very abstract meta-musical material in the theoretical structures of the ancient tunings. It was a dead subject for many centuries while Western music developed its industrial form of square meters and the twelve tone scale. Meanwhile a new occultism had sprung forth as a radical reaction to industrial society, which had fermented numerical mysticism anew to take up and breath new life into the abstract theories of ancient music and mysticism. The ruin-like nature of these structures sometimes required creativity to fill in the gaps. A British musicologist, Kathleen Schlesinger, took it onto herself to excavate and measure ancient musical pipes, and derive a theory of their tuning, without even hearing them.
Her large and detailed tome of speculative theory, “The Greek Aulos,” reflected a contemporary milieu, in particular the new occultism at the time, which sought a sort of harmony between spirituality and science (Bowan). The years leading up to the turn of the 20th century saw the founding of Theosophy by Madame Blavatsky, and its offshoot, Anthroposophy, lead by Rudolph Steiner. These occult societies sought to syncretize the wisdom of the world’s religions and also incorporate knowledge of nature and science. Science and religion taken together was digestible to Victorians, and they sought to uncover occult, or hidden, knowledge by a comparative study world religions. Comparative musicology became popular at the time, and Schlesinger participated by comparing the Ancient Greek musical instruments with those of “native” or “natural” world musics. These terms, native and natural, were associated with non-European cultures that were deemed “primitive”. Ames points to the “temporal fallacy” of early comparative musicology was to excavate the ancient origins of western music from these native/natural musics, which could be recorded on wax cylinders for autopsy (Ames, 2003).
A key component of Anthroposophy was a spiritual examination of colors, materials, phenomena, and most importantly, numbers. There were associations between numbers and the mystical vibrations of planets, based on a loosely intuitive archaeology, and a pastiche of mostly Pythagorean philosophy, that imposed a “whole number logic” onto the universe. Whole numbers, also known as integers, are found in nature in the harmonic series. Pythagoras intuitively applied integer values to describe the orbits or periodicity of the planets, as if they were harmonic oscillators. He did this for certain philosophical reasons that are difficult to fully understand without knowledge of his esoteric school, but I think of it as a sort of “spiritual science” a la Steiner. His school studied tones on the monochord, a simple string instrument on which metrical divisions resulted in equally metrical frequency relationships of the plucked string. They had a complete macro- and micro- theory of the cosmos and music. Aristoxenus criticized the mathematical reductionism, deferring final judgement to the ear, and rejecting preportioned ratios (Eggar, 1930). Likewise, we know now that the planets and their moons float in a very unmetrical track that no simple integer music can be distilled from. Steiner, however, committed the same act of generalization in using integers to talk about planets and music, but he did this for a spiritual reason to work with the morphic resonances of integer primes. This number mysticism was a direct influence on Schlesinger, who “bent” her interpretation of Ancient Greek wind instruments to fit a system of perfect integers. It is unknown to what extent Schlesinger believed in the veracity of the resulting theory, as there was immediate critical reaction. So you could say it was a misinterpretation which became a creative reinterpretation.
That Ancient Greek auloi were excavatable at all is hard to believe. The Aulos is a simple reed pipe with bored holes for different notes, fitted with a cane reed. Schlesinger treated each pipe empirically, as a simple physical system wherein placement of the holes was mapped one-to-one with its resultant pitches as if it were a monochord. She noted that the holes are spaced equidistant, which meant that the Auloi were tuned in whole number musical intervals. She believed that she had found a long lost element of Ancient Greek musical theory, called the system of harmoniai, which was older and in opposition to the alternative theory, using tetrachordal scales.
Her conclusion was thoroughly untestable. Aristoxenus pointed out that Auloi were difficult to tune and easily bent in pitch at the whim of the performer. And a physician of wind instruments would point out that a blown pipe has other factors at play when determining the sounded pitch for each covered hole, most notably the size and shape its vent. So Schlesinger’s derivation of perfect whole intervals, attractive for its mathematical simplicity, could not be true to ancient reality. Furthermore, Chalmers (1993) observes that, in practice, instruments may be tuned idiosyncratically yet work in combination with more rigorously tuned ones; there may have been levels of acceptance for detuned pitches in performance. The symptom of unrecorded musics is that there is no ethnographic reference to compare theory with, so Schlesinger’s misinterpretation could stand in an open space with other theories; it was not instantly discredited but allowed to take on a life of its own. It may have even been known to Schlesinger that her theory was tenuous, as evidenced by a “certain defensiveness” in her later writings, and also the she added remedial chapters to her thesis (Bowan, 2012).
One of these chapters concerned the measurements of pipes from “natural/native” peoples around the world. Here again, she found equidistant holes to support her theory, that whole number tunings are a sort of urstimmung or universal, natural tuning. The notion of the “ur”, or universal prototypes for natural forms, can be traced back in time to Goethe via Steiner. It is a particular nature of occult societies to seek out examples of a form from many different natural/native cultures and to distill its essence. It is actually true that some of the Peruvian pipes Schlesinger sampled do in fact sound like her harmoniai formulation, yet they are not tuned to whole numbers as her theory would suggest, but only a resemblance.
Another remedial chapter in Schlesinger’s “Greek Aulos” concerns the harmoniai as a “new language of music”, to be taken up for creativity’s sake. This parallels the phenomenon that Steiner lectures, which may seem unscientific and misleading, nevertheless have spawned a strong children’s school curriculum, biodynamic farming, and more. In this final chapter of her thesis, Schlesinger introduces an Australian composer, Elsie Hamilton, who used the theory of the harmoniai in her own pieces, which had mystic undertones. This “going forth” attitude is prerequisite for any researcher engaging in unrecorded music, that is impossibly unknown and thus must admit new creative energy to interpret the theoretical resonance. We shall see that Schlesinger’s final creative chapter did not fall on silent ears.
I revel in silence for in it there are infinite possibilities. I am a misophonist, which means that certain intentional sounds distract me. Although music is soothing, I find myself analyzing the recording or other facets of the sound. At the moment, I am writing on paper in silence as my son is napping on the couch. There is the sound of my pen scratching, and crows out the window. A distant motorcycle accelerates, plus crickets. In this space, I can create arbitrary musics in my mind, perhaps based on some abstract architectural concept. It is perhaps what attracts the Avant Garde improviser to silence. I am drawn to the window, to watch my neighbor Bill, who is “grounding” himself on the grass with bare feet to eliminate negative energies. He is an old man who eats two spoons of turmeric a day amongst other substances, to tone his health. When he found out that I was a synthesizer maker, he asked if I could build a device that generates a specific tone, two octaves above middle C, to hold between his legs whilst he slept prostrate, to “tone” his prostate and thus keep it healthy. This is exactly the kind of thinking formulated by Anthroposophy- that any organ has a simple resonant frequency, through which that organ can be bolstered by constructive toning. As I said, this was inspired by the pseudo-musical ideas of the ancient Pythagoreans, who constructed elegant maths in their silent revery. They had no walkmans as they walked among the columns, and absence of said external muzak stream allowed them silence to develop an “internal music”. But these musics, when brought into the world of the physical, do not map exactly but rather have imperfections due to the instrument of performance, be it voice or aulos. Steiner, in his lectures on the inner nature of music and the experience of tone, speaks mystically of Devachan, a world of abstract tones one inhabits in non-dreaming sleep. The tones are pure, and on waking, a creative composer will attempt to transcribe them, but there is a tension between the spiritual tones in the mind and the physical tones in the air. That tension is behind the idea of creative misinterpretation that occurred in Schlesinger’s work.
Imagine an ancient musician, who plays the lyre and sings. He knows of different modes, some pastoral to help the shepherd pass time, some for drinking wine, and still others for solemn ceremonies. He knows how to tune the lyre strings using a strap of leather and sticky bull tallow (Comotti), to the approximate notes needed for his modes. Beyond that he goes no further. To explain Schlesinger’s theory of the harmoniai based on integer undertones is unwarranted and it misses the point: tunings are part of a cultural phenomenon of music, which Plato touched upon, and the pragmatics of tunings, whatever they were, did not rely on universal numbering systems. However, we have no phonographic record of drunken bath house songs, spontaneous pan pipe organa, and incantations with kithara, to prove the pragmatics of tuning, so it all seems rather dogmatic and encoded from our historical point of view. Schlesinger was only adding to the codedness by her empirical and metricizing study of the aulos.
The traditional theory of Ancient Greek musical scales is essentially tetrachordal, taking that interval of the musical fourth and settling various species of intermediary tones at its base- enharmonic, chromatic, and diatonic. Then to derive the modal variations is the same as in Bach- start from different members of the master scale. It is a matter of tessitura- to choose a starting point determines different modes. Schlesinger’s reading of harmoniai shares this traditional modal determination, but breaks radically in other ways. To her, nothing was more important than the actual ratiometric use of whole numbers to determine intervals, known nowadays as Just Intonation. There are two numbers in a ratio- a numerator and a denominator. Steiner even outlined this concept as a struggle between the spiritual body and the physical body- when the former is emphasized the resulting harmonies are major, emphasis the latter results in minor harmonies. A series of numerators 4,5,6,7 are well known as the basis of major harmony, but it was almost occult that the compliment, the same series but in denominators, would actually produce a minor harmony. Actually the progression of these two series does in fact generate a perfectly usable minor cadence. Schlesinger was most concerned with the latter, a series of undertones justified by the equidistant holes on the aulos. The undertone series is the antithesis of the overtone series, which is responsible for timbre in tonal instruments. It was actually a radical result to work with only the undertone series as a theoretical material, since it was considered purely theoretical and thus not rooted in physical reality at the time. This probably made it seem more of an occult urstimmung to Schlesinger. Note how her definition of the harmoniai harmonizes with harmonics: it is but the same thing upside down. Her process of modalization was similar to the other theories because it used different starting points in the master scale as determinants for modal variation. But she also prefigured a later synthesis of her ideas by incorporating a characteristic overtone into each series. The number was chosen from ancient “harmonic” numbers for the planets. This number was then divided by itself to generate the fundamental, and a sequence of whole number modulations of the denominator thus generated the scale. The resulting scales are unique sounding because they contain high primes like 13 and also their spacing is not diatonic but rather amorphous. Some intervals parallel certain arab scales as well, because they have a “neutral” characteristic, lying microtonally somewhere between our twelve tone concept of major and minor. (Schlesinger)
That the harmonic series is readily available in acoustic instruments was well known, but Schlesinger’s use of the inverse, undertone series struck a chord with musicologists; the undertone series was attacked as purely theoretical and thus untenable in practice. This is perhaps the radical appeal of Schlesinger’s innovation, in uncovering a controversial theory.
As a synthesizer maker one frequently encounters the undertone series; there is a general circuit category called “hard sync”, which uses a slave oscillator to generate undertones of a given master frequency. The technique is often stumbled upon in DIY situations, where one oscillator overpowers another due to an impedance mismatch, and thus the second is forced to vibrate at integer periodicity to the first. Thus it is often heard in dirty electronics, noise, and power electronics, and often homemade circuits using the ubiquitous “555” chip, which includes a little circuit recipe for “frequency division” in its datasheet. This chip is especially good for master-slave relationships, because at its output it can provide high current, but its inner workings can be made very sensitive to current relationships. Also, it has a separate trigger input to further encourage such topologies. The idea of undertones, via the hard-sync circuit, is used in oscilloscopes, and TV circuits, and even in drum machines to select different divisions of a master pulse.
Actually it may be due to the prevalence of the undertone series in electronics, or its theoretical nature opposing the harmonic series, that inspired some artists to attempt techniques of playing it acoustically. Mari Kimura, a violinist, has learned to play the series by hard bowing. She says that it was not due to knowledge of the undertone series, but that she was inspired by the electronic pitches and timbres she was listening to at the time she invented that technique (email conversation, 2013). José A.Sotorrio has created the undertone series by lightly touching a resonating tuning fork to a piece of paper. Analyzing the acoustic situation as a circuit topology, the metal of the tuning fork is a master oscillator and the paper becomes a sort of slave. Schlesinger’s analysis of the harmoniai takes one of Pythagoras’ planetary numbers as the frequency for a master oscillator, and the aulos player is the slave that plays the undertones of the planet.
The radical use of undertones in a codified theory appealed to many musicians within the 20th century American Avant-Garde. They had seen Schoenberg completely exhaust the twelve tone series that Bach had pioneered, and were looking for new systems (Johnson, 2008). The composer and instrument builder, Harry Partch, had a direct connection with Kathleen Schlesinger, when he visited her flat in London and saw her reproductions of Ancient Greek instruments, along with a piano tuned to the undertone series. Afterwards he burned his old twelve tone pieces and started using Just Intonation, a generalized system of whole number ratio descriptions of ratios (Partch, 1974). He started with the Schlesinger misinterpretation of undertones, and expanded the theory considerably, using both the overtone and undertone series equally, and exploring modulations and mixtures of both. One of the interesting results of Schlesinger’s equidistant hypothesis is that sophisticated primes such as 7, 11, and 13 were frequent in every scale, and Partch began to work with these strange intervals as well. Besides appropriating the numerical approach, Partch also took Schlesinger’s attempt to reproduce ancient instruments himself.
In high school, I chose to study classics because I think I was attracted to the esoteric nature of dead languages, and also the unique position of my teacher as a fanatic of Roman augury; Mrs. Welch inspired me in her attempt to “be” ancient. In my nascent craft of luthiery, I attempted to reproduce Ancient Greek instruments. I stumbled upon Partch in 1996 by searching for the phrase “Kithara replica”. His radical reinterpretation of the instrument further inspired my trajectory down the path of experimental instrument construction.
Although Partch’s kitharas may look ostensibly like the originals seen on pottery shards, their construction is Partch’s own reinterpretation; they are much larger, requiring performers to stand on platforms, and have multiplex banks of strings played with “perspex rods” to bend the pitch of many notes at once. Compare with the ancient kithara, which was a simple instrument of scarcely seven strings for setting a simple melody for the singer, and we find that Partch was reinterpreting the instrument itself to fit into his concepts of physicality in performance. He was looking to use the human body of the musician for its physical dance form, thus the large instrument was made for large gestures. Also, he highly valued the spoken word as contrasted with the “high art singer”, so he tended to notate songs with the microtonal variations that approached natural speech. His theory, which he called corporeality, taken with his use of Just Intonation, shows the paradoxical nature of his music; on one hand he was interested in specific and fine control of pitches with purely integer relationships, but on the other hand he curated techniques of bending these pitches by using natural speaking techniques and “noise instruments” designed to mimic or bring out dance-like body movements. This shows his motivation for using JI was as part of an anti-establishment, or deconstructive, feeling of composers at the time, and that he was willing to deconstruct the system he appropriated itself.
Another influence on Partch in adopting an alternative tuning was A.H. Fox Strangways, an early ethnomusicologist working twenty years prior to Schlesinger. I read his book, “The Music of Hindostan,” as a sort of theoretical complement to “The Greek Aulos,” because instead of attempting to reconstruct a codified but silent music, it took a living and heard musical tradition and attempted to codify it; the two attempts represent two sides to the act of interpreting. There were prior theorists in Fox Strangway’s India; he relied on an ancient source, “Bharata”, and he also refuted the early work of another Brit, Sir William Jones (Zon, 2006). Perhaps Fox Strangways made an esoteric aesthetic decision to criticize the assimilating theories of his predecessor, Jones, whom he saw as generalizing Indian music into the twelve tone scale for his anthology of folk songs. Fox Strangways also criticized the missionary spread of the harmonium, because it too forced Indian music into the twelve tone scale. He offered up the ancient 22 tone scale of Bharata in defiance to the western twelve tone scale. It is not certain, however, how accurate this alternative tuning was to Indian reality at the time, since raga were performed not microtonally but in a tuning space very similar to western modality. Also, instrumentalists then as now practice pitch bending so that any scale becomes fluid among its articulations, and of course, India as a whole was composed of many separate and diverse “tuning” regions rather than the north-south dichotomy we tend to focus on today.
Schlesinger and her harmoniai, Fox Stragways and his harmonium. Whether the harmonium is responsible for homogenizing the Indian tuning landscape is beyond the purview of this paper, but I bring up Fox Strangways’ ethnomusicology as a counterpoint to Schlesinger’s theoretical archaeology; they both exemplify some sort of creative coding. You can see Fox Strangways grappling with whether the microtonal system of shrutis truly represented the heard musical reality, and whether foreign incursions are changing that reality by “codeswitching” the tuning space. Schlesinger did not have to worry about such issues because the music she was studying had no recorded reality.
Whether or not Schlesinger knew her interpretation of equidistant holes on auloi was acoustically flawed, it is evident that she was beholden to the new theories of scale structure that had arisen from her work. Was Fox Strangways encoding a microtonal reality of Indian music, or reacting to contemporaneous western incursions that were “twelvetoning” the native system? The impact of both theoretical efforts on the Avant-Garde via Partch are examples of idea diffusion, as defined by McGraw, wherein “an element from one culture is only partially accepted, not fully understood, or otherwise incompletely incorporated into another culture” (McGraw, 2009). Furthermore, origins in idea diffusion are forgotten; Schlesinger and her book are but a footnote in Partch’s thesis, lying on a library shelf dusty and deprecated due to a fallacious nature. Fox Strangway’s pages are equally as yellowed.
Since Partch, Just Intonation flourished in a plethora of microtunings explored in the latter half of the 20th century. In founding the “Theater of Eternal Music,” an experimental ensemble in New York City, LaMonte Young and Tony Conrad quickly formed a dichotomy about the practice and execution of Just Intonation. After a falling out and dissolution of the group, the tension increased between Young, who pursued finer and more precise harmonic intervals, and Conrad, who sought to deconstruct the Pythagorean system, which he saw as anti-democratic in ascribing mystical status to numbers, leading to a hierarchical social order. His CD, “Slapping Pythagoras,” explores the consonances between the notes of the Pythagorean scale, using primes of a higher order- 7, 11, and 13- that in their sophisticated intervallic relationships tend to explode consonance. Conrad also uses glissando and tuning imperfections in performance, like the ancient aulete who contributed to consonant ambiguity and slippage in musical practice. The song title, “The Heterophony of the avenging democrats, outside, cheers the incineration of the Pythagorean elite, whose shrill harmonic agonies merge and shimmer inside their torched melting house.” says it all. It is in direct response to Young’s titles, such as “The Tortoise Droning Selected Pitches from The Holy Numbers for The Two Black Tigers, The Green Tiger and The Hermit,” which encodes whole numbers as mystical overtones not unlike Schlesinger’s interpretation of the harmony of the spheres. One artist is reaching for a universal harmony, the other to bring music back to pragmatics, a democratic form free of esoteric knowledge, by allowing impure and fluid tuning practice. I would propose a malapropism of an everyday synthesizer term, pitchbending, as a descriptor for this process of creativity in encoding and decoding tunings, and deconstructing them again from within practical musical situations. The Ancient Greek aulete was a pitchbender.
There is another kind of bending that may be analogized to pitchbending, the idea of circuitbending. Here is a sort of “universal” definition: the process involves a tension between digital and analog, as a codifier which outputs sound through an analog network, and this sound that is turned back to influence be codified again. It is a loop of feedback generative of ecstatic new material in what otherwise would have been a mundane, linear topology. This definition focuses on what makes circuitbending a generative process, and avoids the technical, hacking side. The dialectic of continuous encoding and bending, can be seen in the strict numbering of Pythagoras and Fox Strangway, the misinterpretation of Schlesinger, the corporeality of Partch, and the dogmatics of Young versus pragmatics of Conrad.
Let me now describe a circuit topology that I think further abstracts the idea of circuit bending. In 2009, Rob Hordijk, a synthesizer builder in Netherlands, introduced his concept, called “Rungling”, which is a two part circuit idea. On one hand, there is a pair of oscillators set to any frequency by means of a continuous input control voltage. On the other hand, a binary shift register encodes the difference tones between the two oscillators; it makes an arbitrary decision based on the states of the two oscillators, and this decision is the essence of encoding. The encoder stores these decisions in eight bits of memory, providing a persistence of state for the arbitrations. Furthermore, the rungler circuit includes a feedback loop from the output of the encoder, which is converted back into an analog signal by means of resistor network, and fed into the oscillators as their frequency modulator. (Hordijk, 2006). This looping of progressive encoding, decoding, with analog “misinterpretation” in between generates a richly chaotic sound world with great sensitivity to initial conditions. In 2009, I invited Rob to lead a workshop in Baltimore to introduce locals to his synthesizer, the Benjolin, and to have a chance to build one. I was captivated by his coining the term “Rungler” which I thought perfectly abstracted circuitbending. For the context of this paper I include a topologically simplified, map-like image of a paper circuit. It actually can be assembled using a printout of this paper along with some transistors (see ciat-lonbarde.net/paper), but that is not the purpose of its presentation here. Rather, it is to schematize the interaction of coding and the resulting slippage that occurs due to pragmatic realization in the analog domain; it is a machine of misinterpretation. It should be thought of as a loop of two elements, with neither in precedence over the other, but rather mutually influencing each other; however, we shall read from left to right. A binary encoder stands on the left with square aesthetic, and to the right is a dual oscillator with organic layout. In the middle is a speaker amplifier, for the circuit is conceived as an introduction to synthesis circuitry. The dotted lines on the edge represent strands of communication between the elements of the feedback system; these nodes can be crossed with other nodes on the same circuit, or on other circuits to further “codebend” the resulting assemblage. I would compare this act of circuit bending to the Ancient Greek theoretician who stratified arbitrary pitches and Avant Garde musician who picked radical new tunings from texts to oppose the established norms. What is important about the codings is that at their received point they have become metamusical; without analogous recording they represent an abstract music, and allow for reinterpretation and generation of new creative material.
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