Effects Open for the hall and delay pedals. Switch them on or off for each city with the More button on its card.
This map holds the places I've lived. Try it with yours.
About Three Cities
Three Cities is a piece about the places I've called home. I studied music in Boston, lived in Copenhagen, and now live and make music in London. Here, each of those cities plays live from its own weather: its temperature, its clouds and wind, its sunrise and its sunset. The sky never repeats, so neither does the music.
I trained as a traditional musician, but I've always been drawn to machines that make music. Sequencers, drum machines, modular synths, rules that play themselves. Generative music lets me set up the conditions and then listen to what the world does with them.
For many years I made interactive and experiential work for the cultural sector, including as creative director at the Peabody Essex Museum. This project brings those threads together: places, memory and a soundtrack that keeps changing. Swap in the cities you've lived in and it becomes yours.
Euclidean rhythm
Take a number of notes and spread them as evenly as possible across a number of steps. It is Euclid's algorithm, and it produces rhythms heard all over the world, like the Cuban tresillo (3 notes in 8 steps). Here, the weather picks both numbers.
Polymeter
Each city runs its own pattern length at its own rate, so they drift in and out of phase. Right now all three land on the one together every
The weather
Temperature in °C sets the steps (below zero, the city drops an octave). Humidity, wind, cloud or rain sets the hits. The sun's height opens each city's filter, and cloud cover adds reverb, so overcast cities sound foggier.
Weather from Open-Meteo · Forrest James
Grand piano: Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm, CC BY 3.0 · Harp: VSCO 2 Community Edition, CC0