I’ve got a couple of things to show you which might help explain how I’m visualising the piece of music I’m creating.
The video above shows a wave pendulum (sometimes called a harmonic pendulum) and if you watch you’ll see how the pendulums phase in and out of time with each other, eventually returning back to the point where they’re all swinging in unison. This is a much more complex pattern than mine because there are many more pendulums – if you think of one pendulum as one of my ticks then my version of this would just have three balls.
This is a picture of a standing wave, taken from a physics website, and although it doesn’t represent exactly what my ticks do (if you’re going to be all science-y about it) it is nonetheless a good way of visualising what is happening, and pretty much how I think of it in my head.
If you imagine that each of the wavy lines represents one of my ticks, you can see that there are points when all three come together perfectly – marked in purple as ‘nodes’ on the diagram. The red arrows point to ‘antinodes’ which are the parts where the three lines are most spread out and separated from each other.
The straight dotted line that goes right through the middle is like the anchor for my harmony. (If you’re interested, it’s a G.) At the nodes when the lines come together you can see from the picture that there isn’t any room for any harmony other than that one G represented by the straight line. When the waves are further apart there’s loads of room for the harmonies to gradually spread out, but they always have to come back together again at the nodes. If I was going to draw my piece of music it would pretty much look like this diagram, except my piece only has three nodes not four.
The lines get further apart as they’re approaching the antinode: the ticks get further out of time and my harmonies get bigger and more crunchy; past the antinode the lines start to get closer again, the ticks move slowly back in sync and my harmonies start to close back down until they’re just the one note.
I hope that helps to make a bit of sense of what’s going on in my head but please do ask questions if you have any! I’ll be talking about the piece at Frontline Arts Festival on Friday 28th Feb and Sunday 2nd March, at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke.