CSM 35: Electroacoustic Music
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1885/733715042
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Item Open Access Lawrence Harvey: Waiting: Pacing(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Lawrence Harvey; Stines, NivenThe complete version of waiting contains three movements, of which Pacing is the second. The work was commissioned by Danceworks for choreographer Sandra Parker's piece waiting, presented in the company's 1998 season. The work is broadly based around the entry for 'waiting' from A Lover's discourse by Roland Barthes. Central to the selection, transformation and composition of sounds forthis work was that, at one level, choreography is a distribution of energy in space, and music is a distribution of energy in time. This particular movement of waiting traces a constant envelope: a long slow increase in tension and brief dissipation. Across this the five dancers build a contrapuntal mosaic of small rocking motions and explosive spinning gestures. The movement opens with scraps of sound, quickly invaded by more dynamic sonic objects, which wed themselves together in various ways to evoke a sense of inevitable motion. The original sound materials for waiting include the UPIC system, underwater recordings and a suite of studio tools for the spatial distribution of samples created by the composer in MAX. These sounds are heard in their original versions and after various sonic transformations created in SoundHack and HyperPrism.Item Open Access Marciano Telese: Vita(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Marciano Telese; Stines, NivenThis piece is based on the birth of my first child. It follows an evolving path from a water conception to the primordial cry. I have used sound recordings of the birth, bath water and voices to process in Tom Erbe's discrete Fourier-based audio analysis/synthesis software package SoundHack. Phase vocoding was used to extract spectral peaks. This technique revealed an interesting flute-like instrument when using only the top 3 db spectral bands of a vocal sound source. Convolution was used to create hybrid sounds of two sound sources. The resulting sound is a hybrid with spectral peaks that are common to the original sources: water and voices.Item Open Access Lawrence Harvey: L'image Du Feu Dans L'eau(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Lawrence Harvey; Stines, NivenThis work was composed in Paris and Melbourne in 1996, and is for two or four channel tape. Version B of this work is scored for percussion quartet and four channel tape. Both versions are made entirely from sounds generated on the UPIC: Unite Polyagogique Informatique de CEMAMu, conceived by Iannis Xenakis. This real-time synthesis and composition environment is characterised by a transparent relationship between micro and macro structuring elements and the graphic input system used to create images for transformation into sound. Jagged surface textures and high pitched streams of sound are an essential feature of this work. The macro structure follows a descent toward the middle of the piece into a fluttering texture to rise again out of a granular storm and the final ascending streams and clouds of sound. While certain events and textures have a distinctly environmental reference, the work has no other intended associations. Source material for L'image... was predominantly short percussion samples later transformed in the UPIC. These transformations took the form of sub-audio modulations of the original waveforms, massing of waveforms into granular textures, and transpositions of the waveforms into frequency extremes where they emerge and vanish from streams of noise textures. Both versions of L'image... were composed after a period of disillusionment with music and in an environment where the exploration of ideas in sound is considered a meaningful practice. They are a response to a personal rediscovering of musical composition.Item Open Access Iain Mott: Sound Mapping(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Iain Mott; Stines, NivenSound Mapping is a participatory work of sound art made for outdoor environments. The work was made collaboratively by composer lain Mott, designer Marc Raszewski and hardware developer Jim Sosnin. Sound Mappings installed in the environment by means of a Global Positioning System (GPS) which tracks the movement of participants through the space. Their position is mapped to sounds that relate to their immediate surroundings, creating a walkthrough composition arranged in geographical space rather than time. Using ordinary movements and travelling through well-trodden public locations, the group creates a composition in the image of their daily experience. Sound Mapping was premiered in Hobart by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in February 1998. In the same year it was awarded an Honorary Mention in the Interactive Art category of the Prix Ars Electronica, and was exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.Item Open Access Peter McIlwain: Percussian Miniature #1(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Peter McIlwain; Stines, NivenThis is one miniature from a suite of miniatures for percussion and tape (it would be good to find a new term for this as these pieces are now usually performed using either a CD or digital tape). The works use percussion instruments for the sound source on the tape parts (which were mixed down from four channel to stereo) as well as including live percussion parts. The pieces make only minimal use of signal processing, instead relying on musique concrete editing techniques to present the sounds in a continuous musical texture. In this way the acoustic nature of the sounds is retained, but presented in the kind of texture which would normally be associated with synthetically generated or manipulated sound.Item Open Access Peter McIlwain: Songless And Waiting(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Peter McIlwain; Stines, NivenAnd now on a little island tenuous in a hungry sea we sit on the shore songless and waiting for the tide to come in. Part of the impetus for composing Songless and Waiting is a response to an ongoing personal dilemma about the relevance of art at the end of the 20th century. It is often hard to feel that art has much of a voice left now at the end of a century in which it has been so prominent and in which it has done so much. And given the problems facing the people of the world, it is reasonable to question whether composing music at this time might not be a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. The poem above (which is another face of the piece) comments on this dilemma. It is also a lament for the future.Item Open Access Iain Mott: Music Of The Sphere(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Iain Mott; Stines, NivenMusic of the Sphere is a composition built from a series of live interactions I made in The Talking Chair, recorded with binaural microphones. The Talking Chair is a public sculpture enabling individuals to determine, through gesture, both the musical qualities of sound and its motion through a three-dimensional space. Recorded fragments of spatial gestures were edited and overlaid to produce the final composition. My intention in Music of the Sphere was to produce an idealised composition of the sculpture as a work for public interaction. Music of the Sphere is an imaginary spatial landscape in a state of constant flux. Sound streams are presented as individual mobile objects each with differing mass, shape, and surface characteristics. Interaction between streams was facilitated by the editing process which juxtaposed spatial gestures in sympathetic counterpoint and gave the composition shape.Item Open Access Anthology of Austraian Music on Disc: CSM: 35 Electroacoustic Music(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Crisp, DeborahItem Open Access Marciano Telese: Space In The Mountains(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Marciano Telese; Stines, NivenMy first breath in early morning welcomes space in the mountains. The chant-like calls of this work exploit the unique timbre of Sharon Olde's voice. I analysed seventeen samples of her voice using Fork to determine fundamental pitches. These samples were free vocal gestures that Sharon felt comfortable expressing. My interest was drawn to the sinusoid-like tone of her pronunciation of 'ooooooo', a quality that underlies the spectral character of the entire piece. The melange of sinusoidal tones and vocal 'ooooooo' phrases generates a subtle tension between the original vocal samples and the resynthesised interpretation. The chant cycle is enlivened by a MIDI microtuned drum-roll that tapers into a granular texture. Both are tuned to the same pitch set as the vocal and sinusoidal tones. Low-frequency drones are created by using the scrub technique in Digidesign's Sound Designer by sliding through a granular texture using the mouse of the computer to determine the pitch of the drone: a process analogous to altering the playback speed of a reel-to-reel tape recorder.Item Open Access Steve Law: Urbania(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Steve Law; Stines, NivenUrbania is an aural collage, combining the soundscapes of two modern yet very different cities, Melbourne and Hong Kong. I have spent a lot of time walking alone about the city of Melbourne over the past two years, making recordings onto a portable mini-disc recorder (to be used in a piece I am planning). I happened to be held over in Hong Kong at the end of 1995, and spent a very disoriented day wandering about, again with my mini-disc recorder. On returning to Melbourne I imagined what it might feel like for someone from Hong Kong (or any other city for that matter) to be alone in my home city for the first time. Urbania attempts to capture that feeling of disorientation and uncertainty by placing the listener in a surreal cityscape, composed from the juxtaposition of the sounds from Hong Kong and Melbourne. The raw mini-disc recordings were sorted through and edited, then further processed and laid out against a lattice of synthetic sounds (which were generated using additive, subtractive and formant synthesis). The intention of the composition is to take the listeneron an unsettling journey, through locations simultaneously familiar and disorienting.Item Open Access Anthony Hood: Kite(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Anthony Hood; Stines, NivenKite is a quiet piece that explores sustained textures and a wide sense of space. It contrasts with earlier, busier works by the composer. Much of the sound material in Kite was developed from a short shakuhachi sample. The remainder was synthesised with the TAO physical modelling system developed by Mark Pearson. A TAO instrument heard early in the work was constructed by linking simulated metal plates of different size. Virtual 'microphones' were positioned on one plate, while a conjoined plate was bowed, generating a complex and evolving harmonic spectrum. Sound material was also developed using processing techniques such as folding a spectrum around a pivot frequency, and imposing the spectral envelope of a pitched sound onto a noise signal. Both sampled and synthesised sounds were further subject to brassage and granulation. The piece begins with a sustained 'windy' texture, punctuated by silences. Sounds begin to break apart, until a long descending pattern resolves into a hint of the opening. Kite was composed on a Silicon Graphics Indy computer at the studios of the University of York, England.