Granularism by Chris Korda

This album features twelve compositions for orchestral strings or solo piano. The compositions are broadly atonal and 12-tone, meaning they lack a central key and utilize all 12 notes of the chromatic scale approximately equally. Early 20th-century atonal and 12-tone music was often extremely dissonant. This album attenuates dissonance by introducing new methods and structures which spring from a philosophy called granularism.

Granularism is the pursuit of maximally smooth transitions. More formally, granularism is an aesthetic preference for change by the smallest possible increment. In visual art, granularism is associated with the use of gradients. In music, granularism is typified by a chord progression in which each chord differs from its predecessor by exactly one note. Granular harmony evolves gradually, like grains of sand flowing through an hourglass.

One way to compose granular harmony is by generating permutational chord progressions from interval sets, which are subdivisions of the chromatic scale. The partitioned structure of an interval set guarantees that the chords it generates will exclude chromatic clusters. A chromatic cluster is defined as three or more adjacent tones of the chromatic scale, such as {C, C#, D}.

Chromatic clusters produce an acoustic phenomenon called roughness which is perceptually harsh and impedes the comprehension of harmony. A cat walking on a piano keyboard may sound chromatic clusters inadvertently. The prevalence of chromatic clusters in atonal music has plausibly contributed to the genre’s relative unpopularity. For example, one of Charles Ives’ scores calls for a wooden bar with which the pianist simultaneously strikes 12 adjacent keys, presumably causing less stoic listeners to wince.

Granularism can be applied to interval sets in multiple ways. Each interval set generates a characteristic collection of chords determined by permutational rules, but the resulting progressions are not necessarily granular. Such chord progressions can exhibit various types of lumpiness, as follows. 1) Change can be unequally distributed between chords (adjacent chords differ by more than one note). 2) Change can be unequally distributed between voices (one voice changes more often than another). 3) Change can be unequally distributed within a voice (extreme activity or inactivity, such as getting stuck on a note).

Granularism systematically eliminates or minimizes all these types of lumpiness. To ensure that adjacent chords differ by one note, the permutations are ordered via Gray code. To ensure that each voice changes the same number of times (or as close to that as possible) balanced Gray code is used. To ensure that each voice changes consistently, orderings with short spans and low standard deviations are preferred.

Every composition on this album is based on one or more interval sets. In most cases, the interval set produces the middle voices, typically a progression of trichords. The progression is ordered for maximum granularity. The trichords are harmonized to scales, and chord tones are remapped (swapped) in order to maximize the total number of common tones. A bass line is then fitted to the trichords, forming tetrachords that alter the harmonization. Finally, a melodic line is fitted to the tetrachords, while avoiding chromatic clusters and doubling as much as possible.

Finding orderings that maximize granularity took years of research and development. That process and its results are described in a paper which is freely available. To discover the orderings used on this album, it was necessary to rent a server so that a custom solver could run for up to 24 hours at a time and crawl up to 32 interval sets in parallel.

Granularism can coexist with completism, the idea (usually attributed to Arnold Schoenberg) that all permutations of a set should be used exactly once before repeating any of them. Completism is also featured on this album. The Gray code method ensures that each possible chord occurs once before any are reused.

Unlike the author’s earlier purely generative works, Granularism results from a hybrid approach that mixes generative techniques with composing by ear. This seems reasonable since music is ultimately interpreted by ears. The creative process that yielded this album is a synthesis of mathematical precision and deeply personal choices.

It is arguably irrelevant how a work of art is constructed, though the details may interest experts. The fidelity of the process—the extent to which the work faithfully realizes the artist’s intention—is what matters. On the narrow but crucial criterion of aims achieved, the author claims success.

Chris Korda is an internationally renowned multimedia artist, whose work spans nearly thirty years and includes electronic music, digital and video art, performance and conceptual art, and culture jamming. Dubbed “The Bob Dylan of Climate Change” by Groove Magazine, Korda has released music on labels such as Perlon, Mental Groove, and International DJ Gigolo, in a wide range of styles.

chriskorda.com