VAPOURWAVE HARMONIUM
© 2024
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Vapourware Harmonium is a short album where ‘microtonal’ music writing takes the spotlight, or rather ‘alternative tuning based on the harmonic series’ in this case.
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This project has been partially funded by the Arts Council’s DYCP. That grant helped me build my own synthesiser that also plays around the harmonic series of a fundamental note. Later this instrument has been used as a part of the production.
TRACK 1: AN ALBUM ON THE HARMONIC SERIES
This track is used as an introduction to Vapourware Harmonium; An album that utilises the Harmonic Series as a tuning system.
In this work, sustained microtonal* harmonies are prioritised, justifying the high density of overlapping notes chosen on each track. Enjoy!
*Not a good buzzword, but a popularised term for those who don’t want to go in-depth with the theory.
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TRACK 2: TEMPERO
This song introduces the mood of the album. It is tuned in what I call a ‘Standard Harmonic Scale’. You could imagine this scale as ‘just intonation’ with 16 notes and no Perfect 4th.
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TRACK 3: ROTOGRAVURE PRINTING
Rotogravure printing is a type of photomechanical printing that is influenced by atmospheric conditions, which are causations of earth’s spherics (earth’s electromagnetic harmonic series). This topic greatly inspired the motivation for this project.
Similar to the previous track, this one also uses a ‘Standard Harmonic Scale’, but with a slightly different selection of notes (not all 16 are used in every composition, to avoid extreme chromaticism). The melodies of some of these instruments remind us of the Turkish Makam, another system with micro-tonalities, as if played by an electric Oud.
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TRACK 4: ANTHOLOGY OF THE 7TH HARMONIC
This song brings a more radical daring to its tuning; It creates a scale based on the 7th harmonic in relationship to the scale’s root note.
This gives us a scale with no pure Perfect 5th, and plenty of notes less than 50 cents apart, giving off that feeling of downward gliding modulations when placed in the right progression.
The lyrics are an adapted poem from Ramon Llull, titled 'A vós, Dona Verge Santa Maria'.
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​TRACK 5: OCULUS TEMPESTAS
Back to ‘Standard Harmonic Scale’.
Micro-harmonies are so smooth that you might not notice them at first, but are audible for the trained ear.
‘Oculus tempestas’ means ‘the eye of the storm’, as a way to introduce
track 6.
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TRACK 6: BACH'S 565
This is Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565). Unchanged in composition but tuned to the ‘Standard Harmonic Scale’.
To not make a 9 minute song with just some small tuning changes, I created a hard dance version of it. Absolutely no regrets.
Track 4's lyrics.