Output details

PORTFOLIO: Strange Attractions

Composition: Strange Attractions, for woodwind quintet.

Duration: 13:00.

First Performance: Festival Days of Macedonian Music, Skopje City Museum, Skopje, R of Macedonia, 30/3/2012, Ankara Woodwind Quintet.

Softawre: ATTRACTORS LIBRARY v2.0 (2010): MaxMSP External objects for non-linear realtime mapping published under the GPL license by Cycling 74’, http://cycling74.com/toolbox/spasov-attractors-library/.

Article: Creative Mapping – Strange Attractors and ENACTIV.

Strange Attractions commissioned by SOKOM (Association of Macedonian Composers) for the Ankara Woodwind Quintet.

Susequent Performances: Bosphorus University Albert Long Hall, Istanbul, Ankara Woodwind Quintet, 28/10/12).

Software: ATTRACTORS LIBRARY v2.0 (2010): MaxMSP External objects for non-linear realtime mapping published under the GPL license by Cycling 74’, http://cycling74.com/toolbox/spasov-attractors-library/.

Strange Attractions is a composition in nine movements which investigates the creative potential of nine corresponding chaotic attractors, as part of my ongoing work with non-linear systems. During performance, the musical materials produced by the flute, clarinet and horn are continuously captured, processed by several software instruments, mixed internally with the acoustic sound of these instruments and spatialised via eight speakers. The data obtained from the real-time analysis of the instruments’ outputs is converted into streams of variables: a multi-layered mapping process establishes correspondences with the chaotic attractors, thus generating control parameters that can be routed to various synthesis and processing algorithms in real-time. The parameters are modified in real-time during performance, enabling control of the system’s agency through variations of the attractor’s self-organising mechanisms.

These procedures were made possible by the development of the Attractors Library, in the MAX environment. This software allows easy access and tight parameter control of chaotic self-organisation systems for the generation of sound: the chaotic attractors show various levels of organisation depending both on the values of the initial parameters and the changes in the equations’ variables, resembling self-similar patterns of change found in nature. This provides a rich potential for implementing time-varying processes applicable to music. It is important to stress that the algorithms do not produce random behaviours but rather self-organisation with a certain degree of unpredictability. Thus, the pattern-generating attributes of the strange attractors, together with the relatively simple way of controlling their parameters, makes them a powerful tool for controlling sound synthesis and processing in real-time, and articulating musical structure and discourse by means of timbral evolution. The Attractors library is published under the GPL license by Cycling 74.