The Body Worm III

The Body-Worm is a suite of four pieces for a single solo electronic performer and an electronic patch in the programming language SuperCollider. This project is a development of the sonic possibilities of a technique I invented for generating arrays of frequency-amplitude pairs called Iterative Sideband Technique (IST). IST works by first calculating a collection of sidebands (sum and difference tones) from a given set of input frequency-amplitude pairs, and then using that collection of sidebands from those calculated sidebands over and over again.

The Body Worm III is structured around a single “chord” generated with IST, a collection of 130 frequency-amplitude pairs. This collection of frequencies is then split up into a series of ranges, which are transposed and detuned in various ways to create more complex harmonies. These resultant collections are then sent to two primary sound-generating objects. First, they are sent to oscillators sequenced stochastically with patterns. Second, they are sent to resonating filters that accentuate the IST frequencies present in an input signal from Ableton. Using a keyboard and MIDI controller, the performer reads along with shapes drawn on a spectrogram, triggering the indicated resonant frequencies and allowing melodies to emanate from the spectrally rich source material.

The poetic inspiration for the title of this piece was a line from Baruch Spinoza’s Letter XV. He writes: “A worm would live in blood as we live in this part of the universe, and it would consider each particle of blood to be a whole…and it could not know how all the parts are controlled by the universal nature of the blood, and are forced, as the universal nature of blood demands…to harmonize with one another in a specific way.”