Winter Leaves is an investigation into the relationships between harmony and timbre.

The basic technique is to build sounds whose spectra have a harmonic value. One of the ways to achieve this is to create sounds whose spectral components have chordal relationships.
In fact, Winter Leaves is based on 3 sounds, each made up of 5 sinusoids whose frequencies have a fixed musical interval between them. All sounds are built on the same root (47.5 Hz, about G). The other 4 components have ratios of 2 (8ve) in the first sound, of 2.24 (major 9th) in the second and 2.8856 (non-tempered interval corresponding to an increasing 11th) in the third.
The 3 basic sounds, therefore, have the following sinusoidal components:

• Ratio 2 -> 47.5, 95, 190, 380, 760 (overlapped 8ve)
• Ratio 2.24 -> 47.5, 106.4, 238.3, 533.9, 1195.9 (overlapped 9th)
• Ratio 2.8856 -> 47.5, 137.1, 395.5, 1141.3, 3293.4 (overlapped 11th+).

Of course spectra like this have both a tonal and a harmonic value. In the first spectrum the sound is a perfect consonance, in the second is a temperated dissonance and in the third with a non-tempered sound.

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The Wires basic idea is working with large sound masses evolving and changing through the time like a complex flux. Each mass is composed by a great number of single sounds (from 10 to 300, average is 50 to 100) that can seldom be perceived as “notes”.
So the way the mass “sounds” depends on parameters like frequency range, density, durations, attack time and spectra of composing sounds in a sort of granular micro-polyphony.
I composed Wires defining the masses evolution at high level by means of tendency masks, using the first version of my computer assisted composition system, called ALGEN to generate the low level instructions controlling the single sounds that has been synthesized by a simple FM algorithm.
Wires was realized at the “Centro di Sonologia Computazionale” (CSC – University of Padova) using the MUSIC360 software for digital sound synthesis.

Click here to listen.
Note: This is a compressed stereo reduction from original quad – MP3 256 bps – Dur 7’30”

This piece was composed for the International Year of Astronomy (2009) and for the “Music and Astronomy” conference organized by the Bonporti Conservatory of Trento and Riva del Garda.

In the first Star Trek movie, V’ger (pron. Vyger) is the name given by the Borg to a fictional Voyager 6 intelligent probe, launched from Earth and recovered by them while wandering in outer space. The real Voyager 1 and 2 probes, was launched in the late 70s and destined to get lost in interstellar space, after passing around the outer planets from which they sent us images, but also sounds.

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