Announcing: Over:unitY
Over:unitY is the new album by composer, theorist, and artist Mark Conway Wirt. Using classical sacred Greek mathematics to create unique, new scales and tunings, this is music like you've never heard it before. At times sparse, at times lush -- but always engaging -- the music will seep into you like the early morning mist rising from the Appalachian foothills from which the artist hails. The compositions on this release represent the culmination of years of exploration of the ways that sound can be harmonized and combined, investigating and transcending the unexamined sonic assumptions that have saddled Western popular music since the Renaissance.
Over:unitY is dance music for the multiverse!
Engineered and mastered by the artist at Octopus God World Headquarters, all music and artwork are released under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution International 4.0 License (CC BY-NC 4.0) for your listening and viewing enjoyment.
About the Music
The compositions on this release use a non-standard tuning system that I found while exploring the ways that harmony and counterpoint arise. Until the Renaissance (at least in Western music), notes were chosen based upon mathematical principals of aesthetics that can be traced back to the time of Pythagoras. But around the time of the Renaissance music drifted from the so-called justly intoned systems of music to ones that addressed certain mathematical complexities that arise from such systems by a series of compromises that left harmony as something it had not previously been (some other musics, perhaps most notably Indian classical music, maintained the older style of tuning system). This is not unreasonable, but it is a compromise that causes many beautiful sonorities and consonances to be lost.
Combining classical Greek aesthetic mathematics with modern combinatorial analysis I have been able to identify tuning systems and scales that are worth hearing.
Detailed technical information is available on my personal web site for those who are interested.
Distribution
The music files may be downloaded here in two different formats: High-quality MP3s (lossy), and FLAC (lossless). In both cases the files are distributed in a ZIP archive.
If you would like to stream the music, I've posted the album to SoundCloud for your enjoyment.
Licensing
The music is being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0, which will allow you to distribute it freely and use it in your own non-commercial projects, provided that attribution is maintained. If you want to use the music in a commercial project, you'll need to speak with me.