fibonacci

Generative music for meditation.

It is a common belief amongst various schools of practice in Northern Indian classical music that ragas (modal scales that form a complex basis for composition) are in natural existence. The musician’s work is in discovering and rendering these ragas. Through this process, the musician discovers not just the raga but discovers themselves in relation to the entity from whence the raga emerges. The artist seeks to present, through the discovery and rediscovery of a raga, this eternal relationship with nature and the cosmos.

In a quest to embark on the journey towards an identification of myself with the systems of nature and the cosmos, ‘fibonacci’ is a project that attempts to create a sonic metaphor for natural systems that are alive, incessantly metamorphosing and undefined.

This album is intent on pushing the boundaries of musicality. Ideally, it is best listened to late in the night wearing headphones and pondering the mysteries of our existence as we slowly melt into the oblivion of sleep.

Production Notes:

The composition is based on the Raga Megh Malhar (analogous to a minor blues scale but omitting the third) which is often associated with cloudy skies and torrential rains.

In order to embrace the tussle between “reality” and the spiritual truth that is prevalent with anyone attempting to discover their spiritual identity, the sounds used in this piece cover a large spectrum of sources. From electronically synthesised FM waves and white noise to a glass marimba and a soft piano and the more base sounds of nature emerging from rustling leaves and waves crashing. The sounds have a simultaneous consonance and dissonance that echoes the reconciliation between a spiritual life and its existence in the everyday.

Each sound is playing a constant loop of notes for the entire duration of the piece. The tonal interval between these notes is decided by mapping each note of the raga to a number and playing only the notes at a specific octave that are associated with a Fibonacci number (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5…). The generativity of this piece emerges from the way in which these notes are selected by a script and the expression or tonality that is provided in playing it. The human year, having a sonic capability of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, terminates what would otherwise be a never ending loop.

Since nature is a triune of objects of oblivious divinity, space and time, I have addressed space and time by conducting binaural post processing on the sounds and creating a three dimensional sonic landscape.

Visuals:

The cover is generated using a simple Processing sketch that generates a point that is offset by a Fibonacci number and draws a line from this point to an arbitrary point in three dimensional space (xyz plane). The video is a simple fluid simulation of three dimensional simplex noise that changes its form in response to the sonic quality of the music.