Composing an Electronic Symphony, 0.001 Second at a Time
If you could plug a speaker into my brain, I think it would sound a lot like Curtis Roads' music. Here's what you'd hear: a thousand marbles bouncing on a tile floor, a swarm of bees, and some Morse code — all at the same time and all in a cave. Roads is the foremost composer in a genre called microsound, where notes are broken into barely audible fragments as short as 1/1,000 of a second. It's a demanding field: Years of effort can yield only a few seconds of music. Roads has been working on one arrangement for more than 20 years, and so far it's only six minutes long.
While Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven could simply sit at the piano and create masterpieces, Roads first had to invent his own instrument. He needed to code programs that could break open the note and manipulate the resulting shards of sound. He felt like a physicist searching for subatomic particles. His Cloud Generator software — a program that produces a startling range of sounds, from strange clicks to ethereal chirps — contains about 30,000 lines of code and took about a year to write.
Armed with this new instrument, Roads selected his favorite millisecond-long fragments and began arranging them bit by bit in the audio-editing app ProTools. His indie-label debut, 2005's Point Line Cloud, brought critical accolades.
*by Joshua Davis, WIRED magazine
Click here to pre-listen or purchase the tracks from this album.
If you could plug a speaker into my brain, I think it would sound a lot like Curtis Roads' music. Here's what you'd hear: a thousand marbles bouncing on a tile floor, a swarm of bees, and some Morse code — all at the same time and all in a cave. Roads is the foremost composer in a genre called microsound, where notes are broken into barely audible fragments as short as 1/1,000 of a second. It's a demanding field: Years of effort can yield only a few seconds of music. Roads has been working on one arrangement for more than 20 years, and so far it's only six minutes long.While Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven could simply sit at the piano and create masterpieces, Roads first had to invent his own instrument. He needed to code programs that could break open the note and manipulate the resulting shards of sound. He felt like a physicist searching for subatomic particles. His Cloud Generator software — a program that produces a startling range of sounds, from strange clicks to ethereal chirps — contains about 30,000 lines of code and took about a year to write.
Armed with this new instrument, Roads selected his favorite millisecond-long fragments and began arranging them bit by bit in the audio-editing app ProTools. His indie-label debut, 2005's Point Line Cloud, brought critical accolades.
*by Joshua Davis, WIRED magazine
Click here to pre-listen or purchase the tracks from this album.
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