This is a forum for a group of composers working in fields of contemporary music and performance led by Kelcey Swain. Whilst some of this site is still under construction other areas will give you information about the composers and their concert calendars. Currently the page is host to Kelcey Swain and Eric Egan.
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Pange Lingua - A sketch on physical modelling synthesis
Written by Kelcey Swain
"Take a sound from whatever source, a note on a violin, a scream, a moan, a creaking door, and there is always this symmetry between the sound basis, which is complex and has numerous characteristics which emerge through a process of comparison within our perception." - Pierre Schaeffer
This sketch is a study in the combination of granulation and resonating delay lines. The vocal plainchant is granulated, expanded and pulled apart, as the individual grains of sound get shorter and further away from each other they are fed in to a resonating feedback loop to produce separate pitches. The intention is that these individual bursts should sound convincingly real, as if they have actually come from a stringed instrument. The piece was created and recorded in real-time and a live audio feed could be used as the seed for further experiments.
The single screen, stereo version of my new film-installation [Void II / The Other Room]. The complete piece is presented in completely dark room, on six separate screens, in 8.1 surround sound.
The contemporary composer who writes for violin is employing an ancient tool to carve out a piece of modern art. In fact, most acoustic composers alive today are building perspex skyscrapers with a rock that they have precariously bound to a stick with a piece of leather. Cutting edge computer technology allows the composer to use tools that are specifically tailored towards making cutting edge music. Nonetheless, lots of composers chose to keep their old tools. They are familiar with the noises they make.
[VOID II] raises what I believe to be an important issue in western music. What makes the violin a better tool than say, the duduk or the dynamophone. The answer is, of course, nothing. It is simply more convenient, and our ears are accustomed to the noises it makes. Significantly, few people ignore it because it is old. However, when it comes to so-called technology - electrical circuits and their interfaces - what is not recently made is considered redundant.
I like the violin. For [VOID II] I have written for certain so-called redundant technologies because I believe that they can produce equally beautiful images and sounds to the violin. The piece can perhaps be seen as a testimony to the idiosyncratic personalities of technology of the (recent) past. It is an exploration of sounds and images produced by a Panasonic WB1500/B TV Camera and the analogue instruments in Studio 1 at Durham University.
There is no software-manipulation of either the audio or the imagery. What you see and hear is the raw material - untouched - as it was first recorded. All I have allowed myself is to superimpose layers, cut, paste, and envelope. In essence, I have played these redundant technologies as instruments in their own right. I chose them for their individual character and beauty.
Thanks to CultureLab for making this project possible, to Dave Green for teaching me how to put it all together, and to Ron Berry for building the music machines!
"Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born. Today, Noise is triumphant and reigns sovereign over the sensibilities of men." - Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises
Heart of Light is a study of modulated synthesis in its extreme. The piece explores the levels of interaction between the micro scale and the macro scale by transcending the arbitrary boundaries between note and form. In the discipline of electroacoustic composition it is possible for a single note to transform into a full melody of sounds in an organic manner just as it is possible for a whole phrase to be reduced into a single utterance. As humans we perceive this boundary due to our brain interpreting anything with a rate of repetition of over around 20Hz as a single sound with a perceived frequency of around 20Hz. Reduce this rate and the sounds become repetitions of the same thing. If the sound can be slowed down without losing its core make up then we can start to hear inside the sound on a different level. In the real-world the sounds that would be capable of this interplay and exploration would be sounds that consist of discrete repetitions, not for example the sinusoidal periodicity of most orchestral instruments. In the electroacoustic domain this effect can be readily achievable using amplitude modulation, gating and modulating low-frequency oscillators. If we were to start with a single click or pulse and control the trigger rate with a variable control then we could speed the rate of clicks to above 20Hz to create a pulse wave which would sound as a single note. It would be similar if a gated sine wave were used. Now we control the amplitude of that pulse wave by another low frequency oscillator and we get a double level of modulation in our sound. With a large network of similar modulators we can very easily produce some very complicated sounds. An example of a large complicated system of modulators is Audiobulb's synthesiser, SophiaABV4.
Sophia is undoubtedly a very complicated design of synthesiser, so much so that the designer decided that the atmosphere invoked by its sounds should take precedence over its legibility and usability, asking instead that the user plays with it and learns how it reacts to the controls. x|k, the creator of the synthesiser, writes in its manual, 'Sophia may be confusing to grasp at first, because the GUI (Graphical User Interface) is based on "setting the vibe" as opposed to usability. This was purely an artistic decision, rather than a practical one', and goes on to say that the best way to understand it is by studying the signal flow diagram, but the diagram is very unclear.
Heart of Light was composed entirely using sounds generated by Sophia in four 10 minute real-time recordings. This was only possible after extensive experimentation and practice on the instrument in order to produce even the slightest levels of predictability. The resultant sound world is mechanistic and industrial due to the comparability of discrete periodicity in Sophia and in real-world machines. As with Spanish Ladies the source material was sequenced and composed into the piece using Cakewalk's Sonar.
The form of the piece is relatively free due to the experimentation of the interplay between the micro sound-world and the macro sound-world. Therefore the composition of the piece had to be approached holistically. Having said this the piece starts and ends in a similar sound-world so as to lend a sense of coherence to a piece that would otherwise sound alien to most listeners. The middle section of the piece which starts at around 7'40'', is again comparable to the middle of its analogue Spanish Ladies by featuring a large scale stasis which acts as a mirror through with the piece reflects itself.
The overall structure of the piece after the introduction is that of a journey though levels of modulation and back round to itself. In this way it can be considered like the harmonic cycle of fifths which lead inexorably back to the starting point but take in all possibilities en route or like a rotating tesseract which appears in three dimensions to turn itself inside out only to end up as it started.
