Ben Vida
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.