Khyiam Allami is a musician and composer and primarily plays the oud, a middle-east instrument. He grew up in London, and firstly he was dedicated to punk rock music. Sometimes people assume that I only care about traditional music, but Khyiam presented us with something that proved that wrong in this lecture. I may be happier when I listen to an oud recording, but I’m also very inspired by stuff such as David Bowie or Autechre. He believes that ethnic and contemporary music live are two things that go in parallel lines. His interest in electronic music and digital tools got him to spot a big dilemma for him – tunning.
Tunning can be an intervenient for imposing a music culture because it represents something exclusive or unique. People tune the oud is not the same as people tune a guitar in the western world. Every time he tried to write an idea down in the DAW, he came across a barrier that didn’t allow him to compose, even after attempting to program it. What is available to us in most digital tools today is something called equal temperament – it’s a musical tunning system that approximates just intervals by dividing an octave into identical steps – something that is very representative of the Western Music Theory. Allami goes further on this perspective by referring to Phytagoras work on linking music with mathematics.
Pythagorean hammers
According to Iamblichus, Pythagoras made a fundamental discovery after observing that the hammers being used by blacksmiths in town made a ringing sound when striking iron. He realized that the weight of two hammers bore a simple numerical relationship to each other.
Although this legend states a discovery made by the Greek scientist, the Mesopotamians already had explored this thought. There are clay tablets that show a tunning system for a liar, dated 2500 B.C. A thousand years later, there is evidence of a Chinese system using bamboo panpipes. Pythagoras came in a thousand years later, and the only documented procedures came in the Euclid era in 300 A.C.
I mentioned Pythagoras to show this reverence in using the Greek Civilization as the only source of wisdom and thinking in the world. The others are only considered to be contributors, or sometimes they are not even mentioned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zgFlE596q8
As Khyiam goes on, these ideas might be inoffensive at all, but when these systems are pre-established on the tools that we get used to making music, it insinuates that there’s only a good way of doing it right.
With this thinking process came the question:
How can I use my tunning system?
In the beginning, he developed many tools, but all of them failed to fulfil his expectations towards music production. He enrolled in a Bachelor in ethnomusicology at SOAS (University of London). If you know a different language, you know that it is about the grammatical theory and how to communicate with other people daily with different dialects, and music culture is the same. Around 2011-2012, he travelled a lot in the middle-east, especially in Cairo and Istanbul, and he started a band called Alif – the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. It was formed by himself (oud), Tamer Abu Ghazaleh (vocals/buzuq), Bashar Farran (Bass), Maurice Louca (Keys/Electronics), and Khaled Yassine (Drums/Percussion).
One of the biggest dilemmas that Alif came across was integrating contemporary digital sound into their work. On their debut album, the recording went very well, but the later production was very disappointing to them, as they had to retune most of the instruments that were tuned in the western way, such as the bass. A few years later, he got back with synthesizers with the premise of trying to imagine how and what could Arab music be? He used Max for Live plugins to tune the synthesizers by adjusting specific parameters. He thought that once he got that done, he would face the various capabilities and possibilities of Arab music. Instead, he reached a massive anticlimax. We need to feel some sense of agency in music to feel good about what we do, and Khyiam couldn’t extract anything from what he accomplished with Max for Live. He decided to relisten to every demo he made on that device and figured that most of them sounded very pastiche – they sounded like things he usually relates to in electronic music (Terry Riley and Depeche Mode). So, he enrolled in PhD at the Birmingham Conservatoire, focusing only on contemporary experimental Arabic music and understanding what guided him to this pastiching thinking. During this investigation, another revelation came in: he could not accomplish and finish an Arabic experimental electronic piece but instead sought creative freedom. This might sound a little bit cheesy and naive, but I had to rethink everything I was doing when I realized this. Apotame is then the project of all this self-reflection.
Apotame, is a transcultural browser-based generative music system focused on using microtonal tuning systems and subsets (scales/modes). It was created by Khyam Allami and Counterpoint and launched at CTM 2021 “transformation.”