I hear the waves crashing against the coast. The sea bubbles and froths, colliding with the rocks, and with itself, churning and broiling during high tide. Or, perhaps, I’m hearing of the trees in the Appalachian Mountains: their leaves rustling against each other in the wind; the creaks and groans of the wood as they muster their strength to persevere; fauna scurry, scramble, and clamber over each other to find protection from the storm. Occasionally, I see the farthest expanses of Death Valley National Park: the only visible structures on the horizon are mountains, standing formidably against the nothingness. I find the landscape honest, inviting me to wander into the desert and explore my own subconscious, with nothing to distract me from my self-effaciation through introspection.
These are examples of what I think about while I patch away at my modular synth. I forge and break connections between different devices or modules, as I experiment with the possibilities. All of the cables overlapping each other is quite overwhelming. I often forget how I connected different aspects within the system, chasing wires by clenching them tightly between my fingers, following the thread from one output to another input. I modulate the signal of one module against the signal of another, and those modulations are modulatable via other modules: MIDI signals from another synthesizer, control voltages from yet more modules; sometimes, I can even record samples of voltages, then sequence the sample, modulating the parameters of the sequenced sample voltage via more modulatable parameters.
It’s a confusing rat’s nest. But through that confusion comes an appreciation and wonder for the result. A beautiful rat’s nest.
We walk around each day, functionally the same: inputs and outputs that interrelate and respond to outside stimuli. The stimuli then respond to our responses, and so we modulate each other. The complexity of the system gives rise to the wonder and satisfaction at mastering but a small part of our world. I imagine things would grow stale if we understood all aspects of how the system works; only a few cross-connected modules producing a beautiful tone that quickly grows repetitive.
I appreciate sounds most when they’re ever-changing, an evolving tonal complexity that morphs and folds over itself and against outside sources, over and over, until little understanding of the system is maintained. I can let go of my deterministic worldview, even for a second, and listen to something that I will never comprehend, but that I can appreciate for its complexity and sonic beauty.
I hope that we can chase threads and understand the system well enough to reduce suffering. However, I will always appreciate those unanticipated sonic qualities, so misunderstood as to their origins that you can never make that sound, that painting, that sunset the same way again.
I’m not religious, but my guess is, even if god was listening, they couldn’t interfere to the extent that we expect. They were bored, like I was, of the same old sine and triangle wave; so, they cross-modulated the system, introducing so much complexity that all they could do was marvel at the end result, without a clue as to the mechanisms that produced it.