Billy Stiltner - Tunes <*>

Uncertain Una's Lost Location



Rainwater Ramsey and Universal Franklin

Download mp3s here

Tunes Created at:
The Elderberry Etude, Coeburn VA 11-8 to 11-17 2010 except ambent3 - Dec 2009








About the name of the album:

Universal Franklin was my great great great grandmother. Some poeple called her Una. Uncertain is a reference to the uncertainty principal as well as lost location. So if I don't know where Una is located, which is signified by her lost location then I should be able to know how fast Una is going. I really don't know what I'm talking about because I neither know the location or speed at which Una is traveling.

I have read some stuff about my great great great grandfather Rainwater Ramsey in local history books. One of my favorite rainwater tales is in a small book about Dickenson County Virginia. The story is titled "Moonshine fiddle and beard" I don't remember the author of the story but a summary from my memory goes a little something like this. The author was traveling near Smith Ridge and had heard that Rainwater made his own moonshine and fiddle. The author ran into Rainwater. Rainwatre offered the author a drink of his shine and commenced to playing his homemade fiddle. The more moonshine he drank the more wild his fiddle playing became. His long beard getting between the string and bow didnt seem to affect the fiddle playing at all.

There are also stories about his counterfeit silver coins. I like to think that I get my interest in music and making stuff genetically from Rainwater. I have a rough time playing the fiddle but I'm still practicing.

Rainwater Ramsey in Literature:
Kegs of Coins | Exhibit 25 | Big Oak School | Diggin Groundhogs


I used to build my own guitars, I once built a small fretless 2 string guitar to explore the world of microtonality, which brings me to to the ideas and concepts about the tunes in this release.

I have been interested in microtonal music for quite sometime around 12 years at this point. I dabbled with tunings based on phi for a while and never messed with it again till this year. I wrote a pure data patch that could send midi pitch bend information to a software synth. This method of microtuning limits they way you create music in such a way that you can only play one note at a time. Last month was like a eureka moment for me in quite a few ways. I was messing around with harmonics on the guitar and was looking at how they didnt line up with where the frets were at. I guess I knew that 12 tone equal temperament was a compromise but hadnt realized how much I liked hearing justly tuned intervals. I was reading a wikipedia article about equal temperament and seen a graph of equal temperament and just intervals. The 25 just intervals in the graph seemed to correspond to where the harmonics are on a vibrating string so I cobbled up some code to write out a list of pitches tuned to this 25 tone just scale and started playing.

Another eureka moment came to me when I was reading Elaine Walker's Masters Thesis on Chaos Melody Theory. I have been interested in making noise with fractals and math for around 16 years or longer maybe. I wrote a fractal program way back then that produced some sound from the orbits of the mandelbrot. I had always wanted to hear the x and y orbits together but hadnt done anything to hear them together till I read Elaine's Thesis. In her thesis Elaine described her patch for Max that she made chaos melodies with. Suddenly it all made sense how to do the mandelbrot in pure data so I cobbled up a pure data mandelbrot patch and have been sliding sliders ever since.

So now the universe makes so much more sense.


Billy Stiltner's Music