Your Heart Is A Stupid Thing To Trust explores the possibilities of revealing complex rhythmic structure visually with the use of synchronised loops of moving images. The 7 movements use a number of varied rhythmic techniques such as phasing, polymeter and polytempo, all of which involve the layering of a number of parts with similar characteristics moving at different rates. The visuals were constructed and edited as an integrated part of the composition process, and follow the same rhythmic structure as the music.

These works are an exploration into two questions: 
1) What complexities can arise from the layering and repetition of simple patterns of differing lengths or played at differing speeds? 
2) How might these patterns might be represented visually to elucidate their emergent properties and underlying regularity?

The title is a sarcastic play on the tension between the pursuit of modernist ideals in the deterministic purity of the process, and my postmodern compulsion toward immediacy and affect. The very humanistic expressivity in the music—largely driven by my choice of pitch material—clashes against a caricature of high modernist thinking that might suggest that the heart is the least reliable guide for aesthetic expression.

The series includes 7 videos, which can be roughly categorised into those which use irrational and rational rhythm. The irrational rhythms are similar to Steve Reich’s phasing techniques, where the parts do not share a single authoritative pulse. These include “Butterfly,” “Motor,” “Taxi,” and “Backflip. Butterfly uses simple crotchet durations juxtaposed against other parts in a very long Elliot Carter-esque polyrhythmic ratio of 112:111. In Motor, the placement of notes is aleatoric - the video loop was found first, and the timing of the passing vehicles defines the rhythms. “Taxi” and “Backflip” both work very much like wave pendulums—six parts start and begin together, but each must play one more loop than its neighbour, causing all parts to cycle through various configurations of phase relationships before reaching final equilibrium.

Those which are constructed upon quantised rhythms, where the polyrhythmic relationships between parts is expressible metrically, include “Locomotive,” “Droplet,” and “Footwork.” Locomotive explores the layering of simple 1:2 and 2:3 relationships, gradually building a stack of rhythms reminiscent of Henry Cowell’s Rhythmicon. Droplet explores rather simple integer ratios with short isorhythmic pitch cycles. Footwork employs a gradual expansion of loop length, beginning with a quaver-length loop and extending it by a quaver every 4 bars. This is then played in canon by two more parts with entries staggered by 16 bars, and the three parts play out until they have all reached the full 1-bar loop length.