mono - one/singular
phonic - sound
Even though the definition of monophonic is singular sound, it doesn’t necessarily mean one single instrument or voice. There can be multiple voices producing the same melody in different octaves. One of the earliest forms of monophonic music is chanting from ancient times (for example: gregorian chants).
With the idea of singular in mind, I kept thinking about a concept from an art installation by Natalie Jeremijenko called “Dangling String”. It is an ambient installation (not sound) piece which is a single string spanning a short distance in a hallway and it quivers based on the amount of bandwidth passing through an ethernet cable that it has tapped into. I find it clever that the artist is conveying information to the average person in a very intuitive way without any numbers or units of measurement. Besides that, I think its really interesting that they were thinking about the ways people can absorb information from their periphery without dedicating their full consciousness towards the source. So I was thinking… what if my piece is a sonic version of “Dangling String”. It would be an ambient sound created by an oscillator (because I’m thinking vibrating string -> sine wave -> oscillator) and its frequency or some other parameter would shift based on network activity or some other data. A mono system would be ideal for this piece, like a single speaker just placed on the floor with its face close to and parallel to the wall so that its sound waves are contained within close range. It would be sonic data that can be accessed if the inhabitant wants to tune in by positioning themselves in range but also easily avoided. To be honest, I don’t think a perpetual ambient noise indicating internet data flow in a room is necessary in any scenario but perhaps there is some other data that would be more fitting. Either way, I created a monophonic piece that demos this potential behavior of sound. There is no live data input in this iteration instead just very basic mimicry of fluctuating internet usage bandwidth graphs.
The first sketch show the placement of the speaker.
The second shows the bandwidth graph in black and the frequency modulation in red.
This was my first time using ableton. I followed some of this tutorial series before jumping in and trying to create something myself.
I have 3 channels of operators at 3 different frequencies (low, high, another high). The low acts as a blanket that will cover the low range but doesn’t have any modulation.
I applied a pitch blend automation envelope to the highest frequency to mimic the internet traffic behavior (leftmost graph). I charted only the peaks of the kbps so that the note is sustained long enough instead of a rapid fluctuations which won’t register as easily to the listener.
To create an overall diffusion effect, I sent the channels through a reverb channel, which has a Diffused Long Cascades effect chained to it with the Delay Division parameter automated.
Final monophonic piece.