What is Trophallaxis?
“Trophallaxis is the transfer of food or other fluids among members of a community through mouth-to-mouth or anus-to-mouth feeding. Along with nutrients, trophallaxis can involve the transfer of molecules such as pheromones, organisms such as symbionts, and information to serve as a form of communication.” (thanks Wikipedia)
Trophallaxis is an exchange - between divine timeless tradition and cutting-edge experimentation, between the acoustic and the electronic, beween phat bass in your face and trebles to tickle the ears, between contemplative soulful progressions and banging barrages of flying fingers, between myself and the talented musicians I’m fortunate enough to encounter in my orbit.
Trophallaxis is my music project! I started my tabla journey in 2019 after a transformative experience involving an echoing bridge, some trains, and the imagined confluence of virtuosic tabla with atmospheric dub techno. I have a long way to go, but in the meantime I’m trying to combine tabla with my other musical skills and influences to manifest some otherworldly sounds. I’m immensely grateful to my guruji Ashish Mishra for being my guiding light, in terms of both technique and inspiration.
Taal Spiral
The Taal Spiral is an attempt to visualize the cyclical nature of rhythms in the context of Indian classical music for live performances. Why did I make this? Well, mostly for fun of course, but there’s a slightly deeper motivation.
To me, much of the beauty of Indian classical music lies in its mathematical complexity, rooted in modular arithmetic. An example of this is the ‘tihai’, often used as a finale for compositions - in the tihai, a pattern is repeated three times, with the last stroke landing on the first division of the time cycle. This pattern can go out of phase with the cycle, before eventually releasing the built up tension in the third and final repetition. Someone unacquainted with Indian classical music can certainly appreciate the beauty of the sounds, and feel this tension as it builds up and releases, but probably won’t understand exactly what’s going on musically. In this sense I find Indian classical music a bit ‘elitist’ - it’s by musicians, for musicians, with performers rarely ‘exposing’ the inner workings of what they’re doing for appreciation by an untrained audience.
The Taal Spiral is my humble attempt to give listeners a glimpse behind the veil by providing a visual anchor for what’s going on in the time cycle to make it easier to follow along with what they’re hearing.
I’m detecting tabla hits in VCV rack with a patch inspired by spectral flux based onset detection algorithms. The visuals are coded with p5.js, and hydra. Generative melodic sequences coded in Tidal Cycles.
Live
Solo set at a tiny festival by Moscow Noise Manufactory on the outskirts of Moscow:
Duet with guitar/pedalboard wizard Accasari:
Jamming with my friend II:II in Mandrem, Goa:
My first solo performance as Trophallaxis, 2 weeks after installing a DAW for the first time:
Waking up at the break of dawn to mess around on a mountain ridge:
A purely classical set accompanying my friend Sai Prasad:
Other
The Setup
My setup has so far evolved to include…
- Tablas with gooseneck mics hooked up to an audio interface
- Bitwig studio as my DAW which mainly acts as a host for VCV rack patches and a way to arrange them using clips
- Tidal Cycles, a livecoding environment I use as a compositional tool and a sequencer to play intruments in the DAW
- A DIY gyroscope MIDI contoller which lets me trigger and modulate sounds with my head movements
Here are some VCV rack patches showing techniques I like to use, and here are some of my favourite livecoding patterns.
