Music by Charles Céleste HUTCHINS

https://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/podcast/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/FirstNight.mp3Every night of Hanukkah, one more candle is lit than the previous night. This piece, for the first night, is about that one candle burning – one long drone, one sound, changing but constant. This piece was made in SuperCollider. It is made up of 180 sine waves, each starting at one note in the […]

This piece titled by Sonia Elks. Artistic feedback from Paula Gazzard. There’s a principle in psychoacoustics called “stream segregation”. When you listen to somebody playing a lot of notes on the piano, but there’s a clear melody, this is because your brain groups some of the notes together. It “segregates” “streams” of notes by pitch. […]

This piece was written for Lev Taylor. When trying to pick a religious name, I raised the idea of “Glitch” with my rabbi, who was initially nonplussed. In Yiddish, it means a mistake or a slip up. It’s in English that it’s come to mean a voltage spike and to go on to name a […]

This piece was commissioned and titled by Tim Walters. This piece has two instruments – one uses the Ringz Ugen in SuperCollider and the other is a Sine wave which is phase modulated by another sine wave where both are tuned to the same frequency. It is in harmonic minor, tuned with the default just […]

This piece was commissioned and titled by Andy Bannister. Explaining why he picked this title, he said, “My thought process for this, is that the first half sounds like a catalyst for a reaction towards the latter half which could also be interpreted the sound of a substance or object changing state, like liquid to […]

This piece was composed using SuperCollider and a synthesiser for Irene’s birthday. It was presented as a part of an installation at the Rupture Gaming Festival in Kent. The source material is recorded with an analogue modular synthesiser. The SuperCollider program takes that material and granulates it, dramatically changing the playback speed.

My colleague, Jackie Walduck, was showing students how to create phase music by putting loops out of synch in a DAW. Then I went home from teaching and created a PD patch to play low-pass filtered sawtooth waves, as an example for a different class. I got curious how much easier it would be in […]

As per holiday tradition, I have again produced a Christmas album, although only an EP this year – or a virtual chamber ensemble playing once piece in five movements. This movement is the odd one out, using the same MIDI data for pitch and rhythm as the other movements use. The only sound used, however, […]

Santa Loves You I was extremely startled to hear the religious content in the second verse of Here Comes Santa Claus. It seems the authors were responding to criticism of the secular/commercial focus of most Santa-based songs and thus were trying to have it both ways. The addition of God only increases the tension of […]

Sledge Trudge Some songs have hidden dystopian meanings or inner, subtle depth. And some are just dull but still popular. From Kenny G’s wholly regrettable key changes to the Ronnette’s questionable special effects, the recorded history of pop acts covering Sleigh Ride is one of desperation to make anything interesting happen. Somehow, this song lingers […]

The Santopticon (He Sees You) He sees you when you’re sleeping. All of my Christmas songs this year are fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.

Funky (The Slow Jam) This uses three different audio sources. In this version, there’s no effort to do beat matching and the playback rates are all based on the same minor pentatonic scale, but without coordination between the rates. I like the end. All of my Christmas songs this year are fundraising for the Hackney […]

Walking in a Winter No Man’s Land Perhaps the strangest part of the lyrics of the original song is when a snow man demands to know if the narrator is single and the narrator immediately suggests polyamoury: [The snow man will] say ‘Are you married?’ We’ll say ‘no, man. But you can do the job, […]

Lettuce, No Yet another deconstruction of a baby boomer favourite. The title was provided by a member of the Mastodon social network, @emdeesee@octodon.social. All of my Christmas songs this year are fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving […]

I Saw the Mummy Killing Santa Claus The uplifting choir bits at the very beginning and very end of this 1950s Christmas pop song sound a bit like weird moaning when slowed down. Many of these pop songs have virtually no instrumental parts, so the only sections that aren’t full of voice are the intro […]