Wooden Musical Paper Clip (Photograph Christopher Barchard, 2008)
This is the website of Christopher Barchard. I am a musician, primarily a composer. Currently I am working in microtonal pitch sets. I am interested in alternative concepts of harmony to the traditional diatonic system used in most western music. As well as having composed in quarter tones, I have used sounds I have recorded and, having altered the pitches of these with software to produce sets which interact with exact resonances, put them together as music. Depending which pitches are played together they create varied levels of dissonance and consonance. Diatonic (conventional western) harmony also involves controlling dissonance and consonance but it works differently at a mathematical level.
Take the sound of birdsong. This is often pleasing to the ear but often made up of many microtones. From this I suppose that musical sound does not have to be in the conventional set of pitches or use conventional concepts of harmony to sound pleasant. I am looking for new ways to compose music which evokes a range of feeling, from joy to sorrow, from pleasure to pain, and perhaps new feelings which are hard to evoke with traditional methods of composing.
