Latent Sonorities: A Transcultural Musical Proposal

In early 2021, multi-instrumentalist and researcher Khyam Allami launched two game-changing softwares that sought to dismantle the hegemony of Western ideas in electronic music production. His inventions with Counterpoint - Leimma and Apotome - enabled producers to explore tuning systems from various musical traditions and delve into generative music creation using those systems. These browser-based programmes were welcomed with open arms by artists like Allami who focus on classic Arab, Asian, African and Latin American styles with distinct tuning and musicologies that are difficult to express in most digital audio workstations. Like a limited alphabet or palette of colors, the default tuning setting for MIDI software is twelve-tone equal temperament (aka 12TET), a widely-used tuning system that emerged from the European classical music tradition, or what Allami calls "the McDonald's of tuning."

"There's a big talk of decolonisation and repatriating or rematriating sonics," experimental musician Morgan Sully told me over a video call. “We purposely didn’t mention ‘decolonial’ or ‘decolonize’ anywhere in our materials for example, as it’s a bit of a weighted term and beside the point.”  Working directly with Allami, the Berlin-based creative joined forces with Bilawa Ade Respati, whom he met through the collective Soydivision and others to develop a more generative approach to music-making. Their brainchild, Latent Sonorities – the name refers to the inherent possibilities of musical heritage – offers music-makers a way of exploring non-12TET musical systems together. For this initial iteration, the material used was via samples and tuning files from a Javanese gamelan that can be loaded directly into DAWs, like Ableton Live. Sully and Respati hope that the Javanese spirit of collective music-making will inspire those who use these materials to also make music with others.

Download the free Latent Sonorties samples and tuning files

On DAWs, tunings show up as a standardized grid system similar to a piano roll but things can get tricky if the tuning isn't twelve notes per octave. When Ableton launched Live 12 early this year, it finally offered the ability to import tuning presets from various musical traditions and the ability for users to make their own with the new Tuning feature. With gamelan, "part of the art is the variability in tuning," Respati described. "The actual details on how the instrument is being tuned has some variability, and this variability is part of the music. The vast richness of this tuning variability will not be achieved if we use this standardized grid system.” 

Sully says: "One thing to note is that the instruments we sampled are nearly 30 years old, so the specific tuning of this gamelan in 2023 may have strayed a bit from its original tuning." That said, the gamelan the Latent Sonorites team worked with is still in use today with Lindhu Raras, an ever-evolving group founded around 2007 by the late Ki Sri Joko. A frequent challenge when working with instruments and their provenance, is that it's often difficult to find an original manufacturer with the generational knowledge required to maintain gamelans. This is not just the case with analog instruments either: "I know that, for example with Vermona synthesizers or Thorens turntables, the engineers who worked on the original designs and who 'remember how they are supposed to sound' are fewer and fewer – so there is this intergenerational gap in knowledge. Maybe this might be something to explore in future iterations of the project - how that knowledge can be transmitted", Sully notes.

Gamelan itself is not a genre but an archipelagic system of interrelated styles, instruments, repertoires and traditions with a number of regional variants across Indonesia as well as multiple tuning systems (like pelog, slendro, or degung from Sundanese gamelan), making it a particularly complex musical idiom that has no easy workarounds with conventional MIDI controls. Equal temperament, which MIDI is based on, "makes very specific assumptions about music,” often causing misunderstandings, Respati warned. "For instance, if someone plays a quasi-Javanese pelog scale on the piano, they might think this reflects how pelog tuning and Javanese music works, i.e. how scale is used in Western music. But this is not entirely true because Javanese music uses a few different concepts such as pathet (modal category) and cengkok (melodic pattern) to organize and elaborate a given composition.”

In order to remedy some of this, the Latent Sonorities sample pack features seven instruments from the Javanese gamelan of Berlin's House of Indonesian Cultures/Haus der Indonesischen Kulturen (or Rumah Budaya Indonesia) performed in pelog and slendro tunings. Among them are various gongs such as the gong ageng, kethuk and kempyang as well as metallophones like the saron and slenthem.  While by no means a comprehensive set of the gamelan, they were chosen for their percussive, tonal qualities, resonance/dissonances and ‘timbral potential’ in digital music contexts by Sully and Respati.

These were then played by Respati and recorded by Morphine Records’ Rabih Beaini in consultation with Rashad Becker. Multiple microphones were used to capture 24bit and 48kHz stereo samples of each instrument. "From these recordings, Khyam analyzed the tuning of each note on all the instruments, imported the data into Leimma, and created a tuning chart with Bilawa to share some of their contextual information. These tunings, along with some of their cultural provenance, can now be downloaded, manipulated and imported into any DAW," Sully explained.

Latent Sonorities wants artists to revisit archival gamelan works using its tunings and tap into the sample pack to create their own gamelanic compositions. Gamelan may be ancient but that doesn't mean it's stagnant; "music responds to the contemporary reality of modern life," Respati described. Now that creators can access a wider range of tunings and samples, he hopes they will create new gamelanic geometry instead of simply imitating traditional Javanese music. Or, as Wahono, from the Indonesian collective Uwalmassa, puts it: “There’s really no staying true to gamelan because it keeps evolving and changing. We’re experimenting with something that’s already been modified several times so the only authenticity that we need to maintain is to continue developing and innovating.”

In addition to producing these resources, Latent Sonorities set out to make a compilation album using a mix of its samples, tunings and live instruments. They invited six artists (Singapore's Cheryl Ong, Wanton Witch from Borneo, Allami, Indonesian instrument builder J “Mo’ong” Santoso Pribadi, Burmese composer Pinky Htut Aung and Filipina percussionist Tusa Montes) to record in Berlin. The album - co-released with Yogyakarta’s Yes No Wave and Sully’s Berlin-based L-KW - features new compositions and semi-improvised works that play with the material of the project, plus a PDF booklet with interviews and background on the instruments. Soon, Latent Sonorities aims to expand the project through a compilation with other artists.

Latent Sonorities wants to broaden people's vocabulary for working with sonic heritage. Eventually, they hope their efforts will encourage similar ventures for other types of music, Asian or otherwise.“Ultimately, our hope is that we can open up specific music-making practices to experimentation without decontextualizing the rich heritage they come from. If someone gets inspired and wants to expand on traditions they connect with, that would be incredible," Sully said. 

Learn more about Latent Sonorites on their website

Text and interview: Nyshka Chandran

Photos: Eunice Maurice