THENCE 06. Ad Astra

To listen to this album and get regular news updates, you can follow me on Bandcamp:
insidesandouts...
---------------
The idea for this track came after the other seven had been written. I realised that although I'd chosen a travel theme I hadn't included anything about space. I love astronomy and I had the idea to do something (again) with a custom software tool. In the past I've thought about simulating sounds in 3D spaces, the listener being represented by a binaural microphone that exists only in the computer. Actual binaural is difficult to do virtually because it works best if there's a fake human head involved so that the "ears" pick up the correct phase differences and reflections. However, I took a few shortcuts, as you'll see below.
There isn't room in a TH-cam video description to go into all the details. Perhaps I'll blog about this at some point, but for now, here's a summary!
I went online and found a couple of lists of stars in our region, which gave me data for the nearest 58 stars. Then I wrote software that would simulate a flight around them, with each star "singing" its own song and the listener experiencing the resultant chorus. The star songs were all improvised to a tempo beforehand, and are played using a sound generated from numbers based on the typical absorption spectrum of each star's class.
To simplify things, I avoided trying to create Doppler effects as that would have been rather tricky, although I do have some ideas on how to do that. The power of a star's song is proportional to the inverse of the square of its distance, just like its gravitational force, and that's how I summed the audio streams.
Near the end of the track the listener stops dead in space, and I wanted all the stars that were distant to begin sounding closer until they were all about the same volume. I did this by gradually changing the physics of the inverse square law over time so that distant stars were louder (I moved the inverse power gradually from 2.0 down to something lower than 1.0).
The results pleased me quite a lot. The animation was made from a telemetry file generated when I made the audio so that the positions are all in sync, and therefore you can hear individual stars as they shoot past on the screen. In the end, I started to think of this whole piece as a journey in a clockwork space ship. Rather quaint for a science fiction writer, but hey, Steampunk's cool too!
What you hear in the track is a simulation of a crossed pair of cardioid microphones ...IF space were full of air and had walls making reverb, and the speed of sound were infinite... so a lot of assumptions here, but hey, this is steampunk!
The hardest thing I had to do for this? No hesitation in answering that question: it was trying to calculate which way was UP at each instant. You have no idea how complicated that can become... or if you do, you'll sympathise!
--------
Mike Torr plays Vital free synth
Custom samples:
Various additive tones made from stellar absorption spectra
Custom Java code written by Mike Torr and used in this recording:
Inharmonic Timbre Generator
VR Audio Astronomical Tour
Vocals by Mike Torr:
Various pieces of gobbledegook
---------------
Arranged, produced, recorded and mixed by Mike Torr at Eternal Springs studio, under the roof, in his house.
Mastering by John Elleson-Hartley
Milky Way time lapse shot by Mike Torr, in a clearing in a forest near the Grand Canyon North Rim, 2015.
Star Tour animation produced by Mike Torr using Java code.
All music and words (c) 2024 Mike Torr, Insides And Outsides
---------------
Third party sounds:
Grandfather Clock - digifish.mp3 by digifishmusic -- freesound.org/... -- License: Attribution 4.0 (modified: slightly adjusted to fit tempo)
ClockTicksInsideDoorClosed.wav by daveincamas -- freesound.org/... -- License: Attribution 4.0 (modified: slightly adjusted to fit tempo)
Clock (Cuckoo) - Wind 1 by day-garwood -- freesound.org/... -- License: Attribution 3.0 (modified: half speed)
Clock (Cuckoo) - Wind 3 by day-garwood -- freesound.org/... -- License: Attribution 3.0 (modified: half speed)