Distereo, tristereo and polystereo music producing/songwriting
Well, this polyptych thing had me thinking about how does one applies what was originally a physical narrative device into digital music or art. How can we engage with music in a similar way? It's not that the existing way is lesser or faulty, of course. I'm just finding little caves and exploring ideas that wouldn't exist if it wasn't from another realm to spawn in.
I've been looking for a device that allows me to desconsider play order. While you can say "Daughter, you can play an album from end to start, nothing shall stop you", and I'd agree, but the tracks are still intended to be played linearly in a certain order or at the very least pull clever transition tricks in order to make it seem seamless.
During a walk, I had the idea of distereo (for 2 stereo inners) or tristereo (for 3 stereo inners) music as a track having "inners" or tracks that supports a whole composition, intended to be listened in stereo each or concurrently. Of course, tracks can be listened and separated into their own parts; nonetheless, by combining them, they would produce a bigger picture that is normally not possible in a orderly way. I had that idea because the night before I was fiddling with multichannel audio, testing stereo encoders and decoders and coming back for the reason I got into REAPER in the first place before I fell in love with it, which was surround audio.
The idea is that, we would have less control over orderly narrative (provided in normally written music, ones separated by parts, sessions, movements and whatnot) but more control over the overall picture. This is because the inner tracks we're making are being engineered to be played at the same time, which leaves up to whomever is reproducing the music to decide speaker positions and order of play. The producer does not need to arrange tracks into a linear order as all tracks share the same time positions. For once, if we're making a tristereo, that would mean writing three tracks in a normal stereo environment, but they have to go with each other while also offering good experience on their own.
One cheap way to visualize that is to look how music stems work. In music stems, all the parts and instruments are separated in their own respective stereo track in an effort to improve mixing speed and efficiency. However, think of evenly separating all those stems into three different master files in a way that, when played together, a full result becomes evident. Of course, why can't I do that right now? Well... that would work.. partially. Depending on the production, some inner tracks will have "holes" in it, as if a piece was missing. We don't want that. We want all our inner tracks sounding complete on their own, but playing another inner at the same time, at the same time position, should also be fine and it shouldn't sound like they're competing on top of each other. Ideally, this might work if you have an additional layer for each instrument you have, that is able to be mixed in without being too shy or cluttered.
As a bonus point, one can totally make a disurround or trisurround, diquadraphonic or triquadraphonic, dimono, trimono, polymono; the same idea applies: in combination, they need to produce a whole picture and this can be done in a clever way.
Addendum: Admittedly, I wrote this before I knew about 'Zaireeka' — a 4-CD album that wants the listener to play all 4 CD concurrently in order to get the full experience/instrumentation of the album. While the idea is there, I feel like the tracks don't categorically fit into the description I'm trying to describe. In this album, the tracks NEED to be played at the same time, whereas polystereo suggests that they CAN be played at the same time without interferring with one another, still offering a complete experience if they're not. It's an interesting puzzle to solve for each composition.The most uninteresting way to pull a distereo is to make a master track then separate the ambience part into its own track. It's technically the cheapest way to pull it off but also the one that lacks to extract the full potential of the medium. A track whose inner tracks perfectly balance each other is significantly harder as it requires cross-composition so that both tracks can be written in a interesting, but also complementing way. Chords and keys cannot mismatch and rhythm will feel obviously off when played off-tempo.
Having one "master inner track" is appealing as it provides a center to all other inner tracks, and its the idea that might work the best for stereo/surround music I believe, since the listener can position the speakers in anyway they please and it shouldn't sound off.
Possible issues I foresee appearing in a major way when writing music this way:
- Sounds on top of each other in a jarring way;
- One or more inner track feeling "too empty" in general;
- One or more inner track having "holes" or empty spaces intended to be filled by another inner track;
- Bass notes clashing across inner tracks;
- Managing build-ups of sonic energy (eg: balancing drums).
As much as I wanted to keep this to myself, it's also an obvious trick to pull off. If we have tracks that we don't want to play when another inner is playing, we can pull off a classic phase invert trick, which totally silences the track in question which can eliminate possible clutter when playing both inners at the same time. I can see it being used for drums for example, maybe we want two kits playing at the same time, maybe we don't want. However, the phase inversion trick would only be effective on dichannels (like dimono, distereo, disurround), as adding another pair of channels would be complicated, though still doable if you know some math.
At the very least, it's a different way to work with music that involves a lot of structural thinking as a tradeoff for not having to think about play order. Best part is that it can be done with existing tools, just anything that can do audio routing will work out. I want to explore this idea further and see what kind of output I can get.