Diaspora is an effects-driven, 8-channel fixed media electroacoustic composition featuring samples of the kulintang.

You can listen to Diaspora (2023) on SoundCloud or Bandcamp.

Diaspora is an experimental music composition that serves as an expression of my experience growing up in the Filipino diaspora, disconnected from my parents’ life in the Philippines. It is also a direct product of my personal journey learning about Filipino culture during college.

This piece involves recorded samples of the kulintang, a percussive instrument consisting of eight bossed gongs commonly played in the southern regions of the Philippines. The samples were recorded from a kulintang donated to the Philippine Student Association at UIUC for use in performances and recordings by their cultural dancing group, PSA Barkada.

Different cultures across the Philippines have distinct styles and traditions for playing the kulintang. The style of kulintang music from Maguindanao, a province in the southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines, is the most cited in ethnomusicology work and contemporary practitioners.

The implementation of Diaspora involves the triggering of samples determined by Markov systems built from Maguindanaon kulintang transcriptions recorded by musicologist Dr. Kristina Benitez and kulintang master Prof. Aga Mayo Butocan. I developed the Markov systems using Professor Heinrich Taube’s musx algorithmic composition software library, with audio processing in SuperCollider and effects manipulation in Syntien.

My work towards integrating kulintang with musx began in the fall of 2021 as my final project for MUS 305, a class on algorithmic composition with the musx package taught by Professor Heinrich Taube. You can view the original project here.

The following files comprise the kulintang score generation:

• transcriptions/, which contains full transcriptions of kulintang improvisations from Dr. Kristina Benitez
• scosc.py, which contains a class for sending OSC messages to SuperCollider
• kulintang.py, which uses musx to generate transition tables using Markov chains from the kulintang transcriptions and sends the data over OSC to SuperCollider

Finally, kulintang_ambisonic_markov.scd receives the OSC data from Python and handles ssample loading, multichannel encoding/decoding using the Ambisonic Toolkit for Supercollider, and audio effects processing.

The installation of this piece requires the following software:

• Python 3.9 and musx
• SuperCollider
• SuperCollider Ambisonic Toolkit
• Syntien iOS App

TODO: write in detail how to (theoretically) run this piece