Parallel
Notes on "PARALLEL"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 27 (1st), 19 (2nd)
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Sample One (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Jul 19 2022 - 23 Jul 2022
Concept: "Stereo Play"
(TM writes:)
The concept is a stereo play and in the two versions of this work the left and right are separately designed musically. I would suggest you have a binaural listen.
What I came up with first is "What if you put one rhythm of some polyrhythm is on your left, and put the other on your right?" I don't remember any other work in which polyrhythms are treated that way. Ordinarily, the multiple rhythms are closely mixed as in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's works. (I'm a big fan of him, by the way, and one of the reasons for that is that he is a rhythm genius.)
I call such composition or a concept a "stereo play", which I first pursued in the track called "Unloosed." I referred to the stereo play and "Parallel" in the notes on that track as follows:
"Presumably, your ears will recognise a consecutive phrase on a pair of pianos, even though they were written separately as in this notation above, which is an example of auditory illusion. It's just effect of your brain integrating information from your left ear as well as from the right. The "stereo play" is that sort of things. ...
"We are making other stereo plays in the track called "Parallel." Unloosed is more suitable, I think, for stereo play beginners, while Parallel is so for the more advanced. (It's funny if the stereo play has several levels like these.) "
But not to worry as I composed carefully to keep listeners out of a dual personality presenting.
(TI writes:)
As TM explains, this song has a song in each of the left, right and centre tracks, each of which can be a single song, so that the song sounds completely different when played in left channel only, right channel only, and mono (left-right integration) and stereo playback.
The sound of the track is completely different in mono (left-right integration) and stereo playback.
Come to think of it, old stereo components and high-end boomboxes used to have stereo/mono switching and left/right balance adjustment modes. Nowadays, I don't think there are many applications that allow left/right balance adjustment or mono settings.
These days, any playback media is stereo playback, but if this song had been made before the 1980s, I think it would sound completely different depending on the playback media or medium.
For example, it would sound like a different song on TV (stereo or not), FM (stereo) or AM (mono), even on broadcast media.
However, in the 80s, such a mix was technically possible, but it probably would not have sounded like this because it could not be localised with such precision and pinpoint accuracy.
Actually, I tried a 'normal mix' separately from the TM conception, but for this track, the fully separated left-right version clearly sounds better and is easier to listen to.
With the 'normal mix', the music is incomprehensible (completely different music just being played at the same time) and it's a mess. I don't think the fun of the rhythm is conveyed well.
In that sense, I think this track had the 'inevitability of being mixed in this way' and the 'inevitability of being created in this time'.
Composition: Auditory Tricks with Polyrhythm
(TM writes:)
The first thing I did for the composition is to form a blank notation with the parts, each of which I specified sounding at either the left or right, like Left Piano, Right Piano, Left Bass, Right Bass, Left Drums and Right Drums, etc.
As you may hear, the left side is a swing beat with dotted eighths, whereas the right side is what we call a "square" beat (without swing). You can say it has the polyrhythms at each side. The original title I wrote down in the notation sheet was "Polyrhythmic Minimal in Phrygian Mode." If you haven't heard it with ear phones, I would recommend you do so.
The intro starts with the four-on-the-floor beat on the left, but the snare teases it by sounding at irrelevant timings to that, implying the polyrhythmic structure.
In order to make that obvious, I gave the piece nearly zero groove. The tempo is changed only three times, even though it seems more frequently. It starts with the tempo at 96 Beats Per Minute, slows down to 72 BPM, gets a little faster to 80 and return to 96. But there are also shifts other than these changes, because I arranged the rhythm so that your focus be induced from the square beat to the dotted swing or vice versa.
In the middle, the swing becomes gradually faster. When it gets very fast, auditorily at 128 BPM (meaning four thirds of 96 BPM), your recognition of the rhythm shifts to the square and then you might notice that it's just back at the same place (ie, 96 BPM) where you were at first. Even though you were feeling "it's very fast!!", you found that it's not that fast at all. I think it's an auditory trick.
Unlike our other stereo-play track called "Unloosed", this work much more uses central sounding, I mean, making the bass, for instance, sound at the centre by putting the same notes on both sides simultaneously. They are designed in the same lengths as well, but sometimes in different lengths. (Yet, in the Studio One versions on SoundCloud the left and right parts have similar but different tones and thus it doesn't necessarily sound at the centre.)
The piano refrain is, literally oddly enough, three-bars pattern, which gives you some sort of instability. But interestingly, if you feel instable that means your focus is induced on the square beat. If you look at (no, listen to...) the same refrain from the swing-side point of view, that's a four-bars pattern. I guess you don't feel completely unstable and it's strangely balanced.
Sine wave phrases sometimes sound exceptionally at the centre, by the way, which is located outside of the stereo play. That is very close to the sine wave in our other track(s) called "In The Mirror", where it's positioned outside the symmetrical world.
TI developed two versions: "In Crossing" and "In Stereo." The former contains interesting transformations between stereo and monaural, while in the latter the binaural polyrhythms continue throughout the whole track. The latter is something close to my composition, whereas I love the auditory effects added in the former version.
Localisation
(TI writes:)
The localisation has been created in accordance with TM's instructions in the score, as follows.
From the beginning to bar 26 (1:05), left and right are completely separated in stereo.
From bar 27 to bar 33 (1:20), it is mono, with all notes in the centre.
As a side note, in the mixing process, we always play any song in mono at each stage to check how it sounds. If the balance is fine in mono, it will not be affected by stereo. Conversely, a stereo mix that sounds strange or unbalanced in mono playback can be said to be doing something acoustically incorrect.
From bar 34 to bar 60 (2'30"), the same localisation and sound image as at the beginning.
Bar 61 - bar 82 (3 min 39 sec) Once mono at bar 61, it gradually widens and separates towards bar 82 (this was a difficult process.Simply moving the PAN does not make it this way. The way the effects move and how they are applied is also adjusted accordingly. In particular, with phase-adjusting effectors such as chorus and phaser, and space-processing effectors such as reverb, it is difficult to see the effect if they are moved as they are, so the effect is adjusted by ear according to how they are applied).
Bars 83 - 90 (4 min 19 sec) Same localisation and sound image as at the beginning, but the SineWave in the centre starts to ramp up (distortion and flanging are used to generate overtones, while the volume is varied and the localisation is suppressed so that it does not spread).
Bar 91 - Ending The localisation is turned entirely upside down in three-bar increments.
The four bass drums, which would normally be played in the centre of the rhythm, are moved to the left, from the left to the centre.
Sound Production
(TI writes:)
The tones are also divided into right-side (Acoustic) and left-side (Electric) tones.
For example, in MuseScore, the right side of the piano tone is a grand piano type, while the left side is an electric piano, and the right side of the sound designated as a synth is a crisp pizzicato and staccato sound of an acoustic instrument sample, while the left side is an electronic sound.
For the central synth, we use sine wave.
The mix is inspired by The Art of Noise's "Peter Gunn's Theme". That song was also an extreme mix, with the drums completely to one side.
Another visual is from the Japanese anime and "tokusatsu" drama "Kikaider".
As for the intensity of the sound, it is all constant and no inflection of intensity is applied. Basically, at all places (times) in this song, the balance is the same, but only the highest notes are ear-splitting, so the volume is turned down a little (even if the same volume setting or meter gives the same value, the sound will be heard differently depending on the pitch).
As TM also explains, if you hear a strong or weak inflection, except in the middle part (where the tempo changes), it's a kind of auditory illusion (the timing of the pronunciation is slightly shifted, so there may be some parts where it sounds a little louder, but the end is the same, so it's a little (The timing of the pronunciation is slightly shifted, so some parts may sound a little louder, but the end is the same, so it should not sound a little smaller.)
Mixing Procedure
(TI writes:)
When I looked at the production record for this song, I realised that although the mix went through various trial and error and complicated procedures, it didn't take much time in my production time (mainly sound production and mixing). It took me roughly three days to produce something close to completion.
This is due to the fact that the concept of the work is clear from the beginning.
As for the mix, as mentioned earlier, the left, right and centre parts were each mixed down as a two-channel master mix, and then re-started in one file to create the final mix.
However, merging these three different files was very difficult. Simply arranging the three files left, right and centre is completely pointless in terms of sound expansion (it's no different from a normal mix, a direct mix-down as it is, and there's no need to work in two separate files).
However, if the two-channel files output from the stereo mix are brought together to the right and left respectively, a phase shift will gradually start to occur, the inverse phase component will increase and eventually it will be the same as a completely mono sound source localised to the left, right and centre.
Since the left, right and centre localisation are each made in stereo (2 channels) (creating an effect like a slight PAN movement in the right half), if you split the mix into right-left and mono, the movement of each PAN will disappear and something different from what you intended will happen. Therefore, I mix the left and right PANs open to the point where the feeling of movement remains in stereo & the phase shift is not too extreme.
Key Visuals
The key visuals used for SoundCloud are based on an autonomously created photograph.
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