David Worrall: Harmonie Du Soir (1995)

Abstract

"This work is a setting of the last four lines of Charles Baudelaire's 1857 poem, Harmonie du soir : Un cceur tendre qui hail le neant vaste et noir, Du passe lumineux recueille tout vestige! Le so teil s'est noye dans son sang qui se fige... Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir! (A tender heart that hates the huge black void, Is gathering to itself all traces of the luminous past! The sun has drowned in its congealing blood... And like a monstrance your memory shines in me!) All the sounds in the work originate from a single reading of these lines of the poem. The (speaking) voice was separated into its voiced and unvoiced components. Using Fourier techniques, these components were then subjected to a number of different frequency analyses. Controlling the analysis window size and shape in unusual ways produced highly non-linear and sometimes bizarre results, which were-then time dilated using both phase vocoder and non-interpolating techniques, and resynthesised. The different timbres were then filtered and resynthesised before the final mixture was assembled. The work has four easily identifiable sections. The first and (shorter) third sections are based on unvoiced sounds; the second is based on the original sound with the voiced and unvoiced components intact, and the longer final section uses justthe voiced components compressed together. Time dilations are 19/n , 19/e, 19, and 31. The voice is that of Katy Pallier, to whom the work is dedicated. The work was made in the studios at the Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology using Neuman U87 microphone, Sony PCM 2700 DAT recorder, DSP on Macintosh and SGI computers using SVP (IRCAM), Soundtools and MIX." -- David Worrall