Conference of Flutes
15 July 2010 Filed in: Music
Listen to Conference Of Flutes
This piece is a demo of MOTU’s Ethno2.
You can see from the above picture that I use 8 different sounds in a single instance of the application: 6 wind instruments and 2 loops (actually I also use 1 more drum loop from Apple Logic’s library).
In order to play everything live I had to try a few streaming settings even though all intruments are monophonic.
I suspect Ethno2 does not correctly address multi-core processors like those of my MacBookPro.
You can see this is Ethno version 2.0.1 because I have loaded a user tuning (the previous version did not allow that).
The tuning is the usual dodecatonic mode of Carlos Gamma I have recently used (see Hal Trumpetti for more explanations).
The inspiration for the title comes from an old album by Dave Holland called “Conference of the Birds” (whose title was taken from that of a 4,500 line epic poem by Persian Sufist writer, Farid al-Din Attar). Not that my song has anything to do with Dave Holland or Sufis. I just liked the idea of a song with woodwind instruments named that way!
P. R. commented:
Wonderful! Reminds me of the intro to Herbie Hancock's Watermellon Man on Headhunters, with five guys blowing on beer bottles before the synth bass comes in. I kept waiting for the bass, but that's just me. Terrific stuff, as always.