Ultraviolet Light is proud to release two new side-long compositions from Max Eilbacher:

Digital Sketch For Strings
One morning I had an idea for a string composition. The tonal colors of the strings would be constantly morphing between shifting intonations. A rising and falling spectrum of many different sonorities would construct a throbbing, living whole. The gestural and perceptive qualities of the stringed accumulation would exist somewhere between glacial and in constant motion. I ended up using saw waves instead of string samples or acoustic instruments, as I found the harmonics of a saw wave helped achieve what I was hearing in my head that morning.

Spectral Masking Room Construction
A work exploring onset partials on audio perception and spectral masking. I started with a woodblock sample. For me, the woodblock's harsh yet beautiful striking sound is complex. The short burst acts as an extremely salient and trepidatious sonic cue. After listening for hours to a single strike and performing in-depth spectral analysis, I began to hear and comprehend the strike’s intricate material composite as extending beyond its short temporal life. The burst started to exist as an impulse response. With each strike, information about the space in which the woodblock’s material existed for the recording was communicated.

The room in which the wood was struck was just as much a part of the sonic material being heard as the wooden material colliding with one another. Synthesizing the woodblock sound from scratch turned into a minute study of individual partial’s attack and decay times. I used the results of spectral analysis and composed around the initial short strike. The pitches comprising the fundamentals and overtones in the sample were extracted in various clusters and used to create a few different digital synths. The timing structure of the sampled and synthesized strikes are controlled by a simple counting transform. By doing so I set conceptual throughlines for the variants of struck sounds. The many variations of partials being highlighted or sent to the audio background serve to imitate “fake” spaces in which these sounds exist and convey subtle architectural information to the listener.