Transmetric Variations (2020)

Acousmatic work for mixed digital media. This work was premiered in “La hora acusmática” festival from Cordoba Buenos aires in a virtual concert on september 2022.

In this piece, I have found a new way of avoiding centralities. This piece is about going always to the periphery running away from the center. My obsession, against centralities, is reborn here with a new algorithm. To decolonize our reality we need to avoid the centralities created by dominant thinking.  Transmetric is the name of the algorithm. Transmetricism helps us to prevent the supposed normality created by centralities

This piece is an algorithm-created work using several containerized streams of musical events that repeat at different velocities like a waveform. The phase of the periodic movement of each container concerning the other containers determines the stochastic parameters used to generate the stream of notes inside the container. The parameters used are the Sigma and the Lambda of a Gaussian number generator. These parameters are different for each container and each sound feature of each container. All the notes of the same container and sound attribute share the same parameters of the Gaussian generator during the same repetition. Each time that a container begins, it looks up the phase of the other containers and maps this value to the input of the Gaussian generators. Each pattern works as a channel that generates notes according to this parametric mapping. Each of the sound attributes has its Gaussian generator instantiated with its parameters. For example, when container 1 begins its cycle, it takes the phase of container 2 to feed the sigma of the Gaussian generator that creates the pitches and takes the phase of container  3 to feed the Gaussian generator dynamics, and so on. Each section of the work is defined by the number of containers, the number of voices of each stream of musical events, and by the matrix that maps the phases with the parameters of the Gaussian generators. That’s the way the work is called variations because three is a continuous variation in the matrix of parametric mapping.  

Each of the sections has been generated by a different Max/Msp patch, using a phase vocoder re-synthesis engine to convert the events into sound, and finally, post-produced with Pro-tools.