Composer Roundtable No. 2

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THE COMPOSER ROUNDTABLE
No. 2 - June 2003
BY CHRISTOPHER M. WRIGHT

Featuring:

Paras Kaul ("the Brainwave Chick" - www.brainwavechick.com)
Paras is a web coordinator and lecturer at George Mason University. Her lectures are related to art and technology with a focus on digital multimedia. Her work has been performed at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Walker Art Center, and Los Angeles Convention Center.

Ronald L. Dicus
Ron composes original music for chamber ensemble and orchestra. He appears with the Strolling Strings Associates in the Washington, D.C. area.

Chris: Paras, let's start with you. What did you bring us?

Paras: It's called 'Love Not War', the second movement of a larger work called 'Peace Streams', which is dedicated to my cousin who was a burn victim at the World Trade Center on September 11th. The first movement is very angry, but the movement I played for you is about love because things are out of balance and we need more peace and love in the world. This movement is based on the brain waves I get when my yoga group does its 'om' chants. There are different frequencies associated with brain wave signals, and people generally are not in control of their brain waves without practice. One of the software designers for IBVA told me I have really nice brain waves for making music because I can control them. I've had a lot of practice. People who meditate have nice control of their brain waves. Most people have difficulty getting out of the beta frequency range and produce frenzied sounds, more like noise than music.

Ron: What's the software?

Paras: It's called the Interactive Brain Wave Analyzer System (IBVA).

Chris: When did you first start exploring brain waves?

Paras: My father was a hypnotist and introduced me to different mental states. I started investigating seriously after he died when I was 14.

Ron: How did you produce this, from a technical point of view?

Paras: I input the brain waves into my computer through the software I mentioned, through a headband with electrodes on it. I place the headband on my forehead. The brain wave signals transmit to a receiver that inputs the signals to the computer and then output via a MIDI translator box to a keyboard synthesizer. From there I work in real time with 'Pro Tools' [music editing software] where I input the sound directly from the MIDI data. Later, using ‘Digital Performer’ software, I create multiple tracks and compose the composition. Simulating om chanting sessions, I layer the tracks in rounds like 'Three Blind Mice'.

Ron: You started with an electronic keyboard. How do you decide what sound to use?

Paras: I try different patches on the keyboard until I find one that my intuition tells me immediately is right. I chose an electronic choir patch for this piece instead of a standard instrument like a horn or a violin and used the same sound for all the different layers.

Ron: You played this for us on your laptop. What were we watching on the screen?

Paras: The visuals you saw are just standard Apple graphic animation. For a concert, I display my brain waves and create multimedia from scratch.

Ron: It sounds like there's more than one instrument.

Paras: I added my own voice in the first movement and some hand-made drums. In ‘Love Not War', I put in a little bit of keyboard at the end.

Chris: The tones we heard were all diatonic, meaning that they all came from a regular scale that everyone is familiar with. It definitely sounds triadic, like you were using regular major and minor chords. I'm tempted to say this proves that our ideas of consonance and dissonance have some basis in nature, but those ideas change throughout the history of music and vary across cultures.

Paras: Some of my other pieces have more dissonance where the sounds clash. There's an inherent sense of harmony in this piece but not much in the way of what you might call melody. And brain waves don't produce rhythm directly.

Chris: I bet if you changed the scale setting on the keyboard or fed the signal through an instrument capable of playing microtones - between the keys, so to speak - you'd get completely different music. Getting back to what you said about there not being much melody, I'm sure some people would listen to this and say, 'It's nice but is it music?' Let's talk about more abstract musical values. Every great work of art has both unity and contrast. The unity here comes from the harmony and the instrumentation. But there are definitely different sections. Where does the contrast come from?

Ron: I agree, there's a definite pulse, a rise and fall in intensity.

Paras: Contrast is provided by the fact that your brain waves don't stay in the same frequency range all the time. There are alpha, beta, theta and delta frequency domains. I had an earlier piece about yin and yang where I was definitely going for more contrast. I try to build up tension then have a release.

Chris: That's what a cadence is in abstract terms. A cadence is a set of closing chords that finishes off a section or an entire piece. It's how composers traditionally provided release in their music. Avant-garde composers in the Twentieth century had other ways of achieving tension and release. In your own way, you are doing the same thing. What's on your website (www.brainwavechick.com)?

Paras: I have some rudimentary scores. I'm still trying to figure out how to notate all of this because regular musical notation doesn't work. I have some freehand drawings of brain waves to go along with the notation. The drawings will eventually be replaced with the real waveforms. And there are some MP3's, including some of the more random and frenzied ones.

Chris: Your music is far-out but still what I would call 'beautiful', not like grunge rock which has a different aesthetic and deliberately tries to be ugly. In terms of aesthetics, what were you attempting in this piece?

Paras: For me, beauty has to be the final outcome. I don't want my music to be evil or ugly. There's too much of that already in the world.

Chris: Ron, let's talk about your piece. I see that it's called 'Reigning Cats and Dogs' and that you wrote it for brass quintet (two trumpets, french horn, trombone and tuba). How did you come up with the title?

Ron: It came from my kids during a discussion at the dinner table. This piece was inspired by Ingolf Dahl's well-known 'Intermezzo' which is sparkly, light and happy. I wanted to capture some of that sparkle. So I used syncopated and staccato rhythms. Usually in music, themes come to an end and close with a cadence. Here, the next theme starts before the first theme finishes. The challenge is to write themes that retain enough character to be recognized and still permit a good deal of variation.

Chris: I'm hearing some Scott Joplin in here. It must be the syncopated rhythm.

Ron: Someone else thought of 'Shortenin' Bread'.

Paras: I hear the sparkle.

Chris: There's lots of ways that composers vary their themes. What procedure did you use?

Ron: I did it intuitively. Sometimes you don't know where it comes from. The ideas happened to be closely related. I have felt that other pieces of mine lack unity. This is the first time a piece of mine has been so unified, even though I distribute the theme among different instruments, for example from the trumpet to the horn.

Chris: There's also some nice counterpoint where one voice broadens out and another gets busy underneath it. That's exactly what counterpoint is supposed to do.

Ron: I think of it like cats and dogs all competing for attention. In one part I have a staccato tuba line going while fragments from the first two themes play in another voice. The staccato line is the connective tissue that binds the fragments together.

Chris: You also have an interesting free section that only goes on for a couple of measures. It stands out, and provides contrast to the rest of the piece. Now let's talk about my own piece, 'Bumper Cars' (listen to sound clip)

Paras: It's playful and extremely inventive. It's got a lot of variety.

Ron: There's an undercurrent of energy, a persistent rhythm like Ravel's 'Bolero'. It's interesting when the rhythm changes part-way through and starts coming in before the first beat of the measure. The trumpet melody ties it all together.

Chris: You're right, I switch to a syncopated rhythm in the middle. Notation is not my strong suit, so it took me a long time to figure out that I was coming in slightly ahead of the first beat. I'm very interested in rhythm and find it lacking in a lot of concert music.

Ron: I agree with you that rhythm is relatively neglected in orchestral music.

Chris: Well, that about wraps it up for tonight.

Paras: It's been a great evening. I haven't had this much fun with music in a long time.

Chris: I hope you'll both come back.

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