VIKTOR'SMODULAR_SYNTHDIARY

Two excerpts. Untitled 31, 0:00–0:36. Untitled 30, 0:00–1:05.

I only started taking music-making seriously about a year ago, when I got into modular synths. Before that, I had played around with Fruity Loops and Ableton Live, but never consistently. Now I practice, make things, and sometimes perform. I’m trying to understand what I want from all of it.

A few things:

• Craft. I want to get better at harmony, rhythm, composition, and especially improvisation.
• Exploration. Making music helps me figure out what I like.
• Presence. I have to listen and respond to what is happening.
• Play. I want to leave room for accidents, surprise, and fun.

Improvisation is where these things overlap. It requires some fluency, but I also have to notice what is happening and be willing to follow it somewhere unexpected.

Of these, presence is where I feel the biggest gap, especially when I perform.

Attention under pressure

I recently played a 20-minute live set at Wonderville in Brooklyn.

I’ve been doing theater improv for years, and over the last few weeks I’ve performed as a clown several times. In music, clowning, and improv, I’m dealing with the same problem: what happens to my attention under pressure?

Right now, it often gets worse. Under stress, my attention narrows. I listen less, judge myself more, and lose track of what is happening around me.

I’ve been working on this, and I can feel some improvement, but it’s still difficult. I’m trying to notice when it happens and find my way back.

In clowning and theater improv, I need to notice the other people, the room, and what just happened. If I get too far inside my own head, I stop responding.

Different ways of improvising

Music isn’t the only place where I’m working on this. Clowning, theater improv, contact improv, and dance all involve listening and responding in different ways.

I’ve spent a long time as a software engineer, where I can usually stop, think, and revise. Improvisation doesn’t give me that distance. I have to work with what is happening now.

As I get older, I sometimes imagine the grumpy old man I could become: certain about everything, less curious, mostly living inside his own habits. I would like to avoid that.

These practices put me in situations where I don’t know what will happen next. Maybe continuing to spend time there is one way of not becoming too fixed.

Questions

I still have questions:

• What do I need to learn to improvise more freely?
• How do I keep listening when I’m anxious?
• What does performing in front of other people add to the practice?
• Which parts of this do I actually want to keep doing?

I don’t have answers yet. These are the questions I want to keep around.

Ben Vida is a New York composer and sound artist who came up through Chicago’s experimental scene with the group Town & Country. Around 2010 he moved from acoustic instruments and bands into synthesis and systems-based composition. The 2014 Quietus interview Aestheticising The Everyday is a good way in.

This line stuck with me:

Rather, the catharsis, disorientation, and straightforward playfulness of his music evokes a childhood scene—picking up the objects immediately at hand and testing them, banging them together, and finding inventive ways to bring joy out of them.

That’s close to how I want to work.

I made a few sine-wave sketches while chewing on this — the players at the end of this post run in three groups: just intonation vs. equal temperament (unison, fifth, third, seventh, then a full just chord), beating at increasing rates (1–40 Hz, plus two sweeps), and difference tones from pairs of higher sines.

What I take from his approach, from a modular angle:

• He treats a patch as a system that makes some of its own decisions, instead of an instrument he “plays.” You set up relationships between control signals and let it run.
• The setup was a hybrid of Max/MSP and Eurorack. Digital material gets analyzed and turned into CV, which drives triggers, gates, envelope rates and pitches on the analog side.
• Lots of sine waves, just intonation, beating and difference tones. The room and the ear become part of the synthesis.
• Space is compositional, not a mixing afterthought.
• Rhythm comes from phasing and clouds of small events more than from a clock and sequencer.

His 2011 piece hy.morf.eld is a concrete example: material generated in Max/MSP, vocoder analysis turned into CV, that CV driving pitch, envelopes, gates and triggers across the Eurorack, then several takes edited into the finished piece. His notes for MACBA’s Composing with Process document it.

Records I’d start with: Esstends–Esstends–Esstends (PAN, 2012), then Slipping Control (Shelter Press, 2014) and Damaged Particulates (Shelter Press, 2016). Reducing the Tempo to Zero is the slower, durational side. His Bandcamp has these and later work.

What I keep coming back to is the topology, not the module list — I’d distrust any attempt to reverse-engineer the records into a shopping list of modules anyway. The chain is: Max/MSP analysis and generation → CV → Eurorack → the room → the ear. The questions under it:

• What happens when you translate one representation — speech, a waveform, analysis data — into another?
• How much of the composing can you hand to the patch?
• Can CV organize form, not just animate timbre?
• Can two close oscillators make the room and your ear produce something that isn’t literally in the signal?

If I wanted to get near this on my own rig: a handful of very pure oscillators with precise tuning, function generators, VCAs, a computer-to-CV interface, and a lot of panning. Generate slow just-intonation relationships and correlated envelopes in Max, SuperCollider or Pure Data, let analyzed audio move several parameters at once, record a few autonomous runs, and edit afterward. That gets closer than any single module.

Dennis DeSantis’s Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers isn’t about modular synths, but several chapters fit the way I patch.

I’d start with “Goal-less Exploration” (p. 62). Pick one module or routing idea and follow it without trying to make a track. Record while you work. A patch is temporary, and its best moment may happen before you know what it is.

Next is “Arbitrary Constraints” (p. 33). Limit the patch to one voice, a handful of modules, or a fixed number of cables. A smaller system is easier to learn and often produces more focused results.

“Scraps and Sketches” (p. 74) is a reminder to save incomplete ideas. A short recording or rough patch can be useful without becoming a finished piece.

The later chapters get more technical:

• “Asynchronous or Polyrhythmic Loops” (p. 124) applies directly to independent clocks and sequencers.
• “Sound-Color Melody” (p. 195) treats changes in timbre as musical movement.
• “The Rhythm of Automation” (p. 238) translates easily to envelopes, LFOs, and other control voltages.

“Randomness and Responsibility” (p. 250) matters for generative patching. Randomness creates options; it doesn’t decide which ones are good. That part remains the musician’s job.

Finally, “Arranging as a Subtractive Process” (p. 259) and “Rendering as Commitment” (p. 283) offer a practical way to finish: record a long take, choose the strongest passages, and stop trying to preserve every possibility.

For modular work, the book’s most useful lesson is straightforward: patch freely, record early, and edit later.

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What it means for modular

The book’s central idea is that creative blocks are usually practical problems, not evidence that you lack talent. Each one can be answered with a procedure. For modular synthesis, that leads to a few strong conclusions:

• Constraints create identity. Modular offers almost unlimited choices, which can weaken decisions. Limit the modules, cables, voices, clock divisions, or session length.
• Separate exploration from composition. A patching session doesn’t need to produce a track. Explore first, capture interesting results, then decide what deserves development.
• Record before the patch feels finished. Modular patches are temporary and often sound best during transitions or accidents. The recorder is effectively the system’s memory.
• Generate broadly before refining. Make several variations, sequences, routings, or takes before polishing one. Don’t spend an hour perfecting the first loop.
• Treat timbre as musical material. Melody doesn’t have to mean pitch. Changes in filtering, harmonics, envelope shape, density, and spatial position can carry a piece.
• Modulation needs phrasing. An LFO or random voltage isn’t automatically musical. Think about when change happens, how quickly it develops, and how different modulation cycles interact.
• Randomness proposes; you decide. Probability and generative systems create possibilities, but selection remains the composer’s responsibility. Curate the output rather than accepting everything the system produces.
• Repetition needs meaningful change. Variation can come from phase relationships, probability, timbre, register, density, or the gradual introduction and removal of layers — not necessarily new notes.
• Form can emerge through subtraction. Record a substantial performance, then remove weaker passages. With modular, arrangement is often easier after recording than while patching.
• Commitment is part of composition. Printing a take closes off possibilities, but that is precisely how a patch becomes a piece of music. Endless tweakability is not the same as improvement.
• Finishing matters more than preserving the patch. Patch notes and photographs are useful, but recreating every setting perfectly is rarely the point. Keep the recording and carry the lesson into the next patch.

Mastered excerpt from Untitled 14, 0:00–2:40.

Mastered excerpt from Untitled 19, 0:00–0:35.

Mastered excerpt from Untitled, 8:00–11:30.