Last week, I listened to all five hours of La Monte Young’s “Well Tuned Piano.” Two things that struck me most about the piece:

1. The simple act of detuning the instrument turns it into a completely different beast.

2. The overtones are as much a part of the piece as the fundamental frequencies. At times the overtones combine to create a wash of white noise so dense that it threatens to swallow up piano and performer.

This morning, as I was changing the strings on my acoustic guitar, I picked up the guitar to find that I had inadvertently tuned it to a beautiful, full minor chord several steps down from standard tuning (normally I put on all the strings before tuning any of them). As I noodled for a moment, I realized that just as in Young’s piece, my guitar no longer sounded like a guitar. I continued to play and improvise for several minutes, recording as I went.

The tuning was rich and low, with lots of buzzing metal on wood. But I wanted more of that white noise effect that buoys Young’s piano up into the heavens. So I twiddled some knobs and pressed some buttons on the laptop, letting loose a wave of sound that could be heard as either the logical extension of the overtone-as-white-noise aesthetic or a gauche bastardization of it, depending on your perspective. Listen below:

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I recently played a very unique show. It was a performance of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Penelope featuring Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and the incredible chamber ensemble Signal. There were about 25 of us crowding the stage at Brooklyn’s Bell House.

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At this particular show, I was playing laptop. Sarah (the composer) and I have been working on sound design for Penelope for several months, but we’ve been thinking of things almost exclusively in terms of how they will sound on the studio album, not how they will be performed live. So we’ve created tons of little sonic events, ambient soundscapes, and rhythmic textures, but almost none of it is “performable.” Additionally, neither the performers nor the conductor had heard the sound design before our one-and-only rehearsal. Oh, and playing to a click was not an option.

So this wasn’t the typical, “hit play on the iPod and let the band jam along to a backing track” situation. In fact, it was just the opposite. The sound design was incidental, to be performed fluidly on top of the very human orchestra (though not too human, thanks to conductor Brad Lubman’s incredible sense of time).

There are several obvious problems here: How is the laptop to stay synchronized with the ensemble? How can important sonic events happen when they need to? How many parameters and effects need to be performed live in order for the sounds to blend with the orchestra?

I wanted to create a notation system – a performance protocol – that would address these issues while using minimal equipment (laptop plus a single control surface – M-AUDIO Trigger Finger). So for each song, I created a custom score which could be placed on the Trigger Finger. Here is a picture of the set of finished scores:

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Ambient music for the beginning of what promises to be a sweltering summer:

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This is a recorded document of my inaugural interaction with the very first piece of truly musical software I ever created. It’s essentially about a hundred layers of guitar stacked on top of each other, pushing and pulling until the layers drip drip drip and melt away into the vacuum.

This was made with LiLo, before she looked like this. Back then, the graphical interface was just a grid of gray circles. That’s part of the beauty of musical software. Just as in composition, limitations prove to be beneficial. And seemingly finite systems can open the door to endless sonic possibilities.