​Forged Effervescence 

Conceptualizing Forged Effervescence

The original conception of Forged Effervescence was to be an immersive 3D audio piece where spatialized bell partials would envelop listeners.  This idea came from descriptions Dane Rudyar wrote about Henry Cowells Music I read in a seminar on modernism.  Rudyar described Cowells treatment of the piano as a table on gongs that created varied immersive tones.
​The pandemic made both auditioning and presenting 3D audio much more difficult, so I decided to write a stereo fixed media composition instead. 

Creating Bellforge

Bellforge was created in the Cabbage framework for CSound. Cabbage allows for CSound code to be easily loaded as a VST plugin in a DAW. 
Bellforge allows a user to design bells through modal synthesis-- the user specifies transpositions of a bank of high Q resonant filters which are then sent an audio source used for excitation.  In Forged Effervescence, input, impulse, and noise based sound sources where used to generate timbres.
Click here to get Bellforge

Composing as Exploration

My process in creating Forged Effervescence was largely based on experimenting with sounds I could produce with Bellforge and then editing, combining and organizing different sounds to create the final result. 
The piece relies highly on a recording I made of bubbling pasta sauce that I fed through Bellforge to create sequences of bell excitations that I later cut up and rearranged into varying patterns.  A lot of the percussive patterns in the piece are derived from this material. 
I also relied heavily on on a mesh reverberator that I used to sustain and manipulate bells synthesized in Bellforge over long periods of time.