The Highland Way Alpha CD started off as an experiment. I was playing with the idea of using time delay as an improvisational device.

The first step was writing an arpeggiator in Max that would take a single melody line and echo it back with changes in pitch, loudness, instrument timbre, and pan between speakers—all with varying delay times.

For example, I’d start playing a piano line on the left channel and 400 milliseconds later it would pop up as a vibes line in right channel transposed up a fifth and then 200 milliseconds later it would reappear as an fender rhodes sound in the center channel and so on for up to 7 different transformations. Meanwhile, I’ve been playing more notes. So, 8 layers of improvisation build upon each other.

Usually, every session starts off as an exploration through a cacophony of instruments playing a sequence of notes without any rhyme or reason. But, after a few seconds, the hands and ears begin to synchrionize up and an equilibrium begins to emerge. The performer enters into a trance state. Of not knowing where the journey will lead—but going there anyway.

Two other elements affected the performance: constrained polyphony and midi packet delay.

A Kurzweil K2000 sampler was the sole instrument in rendering the midi packets into 8 channels of sound. Because the K2000 could only handle 24 notes of polyphony, a note stealer would kick in to reduce the hundreds of notes from a fast and sustained arpeggio run into an average of 3 notes per channel. This directed the mind to focus less on each note and more on the density of notes along a harmonic structure.

Only a single midi line was used, which would saturate at 52 notes per second. So some of the faster arpeggio runs would ‘naturally’ quantize. Rubato was an interesting problem because, at some speeds, the faster you’d play, the slower the notes would appear. Conversely, slowing down your hands would speed up the notes. A weird nonlinear beast rears its head--best not the think about it and let the body do its thing.

These sessions were directly recorded to dat; no multi-tracking was used. Some of the early sessions were cut down to eliminate some of the redundant bits (trances are often only interesting to the person having them). However, the ‘grow’ session was uncut to show the usual process for the proceeding pieces. Tracks 21-26 starts off with a half-hour of exploration of tempos and timbres. Track 27 (growbies) became a more focused 4 part round that lasted 3 minutes. Finally, Growby ends with a melodic exposition.

These pieces show what is (and is not) possible with sending music through a 33K modem. The samples are fairly compact. So, with downloadable sound libraries, the total contents of this CD could probably fit on a megabyte, or two—for a compression ratio of about 300 to 1. With no loss in quality, I might add.

For live performance on the web, it might be fun to chain 8 performers together in a delay loop, with each one laying down their own track, and passing along the result to the next performer. Only 7 of the 8 tracks are passed along, with the oldest dropping off—thus, each performer only hears her track in real time. Everybody agrees upon a delay time between tracks—which helps to overcome network latency.

Another experiment is the distribute the sounds in 3d space. Pitch, timbre, delay, and position, are shifted to cycles of small prime numbers, creating an ostenuto effect. Instead of using only a moderately dexterous performer on a midi keyboard, a small ensemble of accomplished musicians perform on acoustic instruments. Ideally, both the performers and audience falls into a trance that suspends time.