Brian Baumbusch – Some thoughts on
“Polytempo Music”
Polytempo: musical instances of multiple simultaneous tempo streams that have the ability to speed up or slow down independently of one another
In 2020, after 5 years of writing polytempo ensemble music by spinning webs of click tracks to synchronize live performers, I developed a hunger to create more and more complex musical structures that would have been diFicult to achieve in live performance. COVID-19 provided me with a unique opportunity to attract the willingness of world- class musicians to collaborate on ambitious remote recording projects. A s the music I created became more and more dense, I dreamed for a way to spatialize this recorded music to allow the listener to actively choose how to hear the music.
“Polytempo Music” was a way of scratching this itch. In live performance, our ears can weave through the strands of complex and cacophonous music with the aid of watching the individual performers. But my game was to make a recording, and how could I open our ears to a recording of such dense music? My answer was to find a way to move sounds around in a three- dimensional way and to show visual animated depictions of how those sounds are emanating and moving through space. To take it one step further, I wanted to be able to actively move through that space in a way that would change how I was hearing the music.
This is how I created the immersive 3D environment for “Polytempo Music,” which presents a through composed choreography of 12 instruments swirling around a 3D stage. A s the listener, you can actively move around the stage which changes your proximity to each instrument and therefore mixes the music in real time.