Cafiaspirina

This web-page documents a mobile composition completed during the author's study of a Masters in Music, Composition (Studio) at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in response to a request for Katherine Norman's Listen Different course.   The composition was premiered at the Goldsmiths College Electronic Music Studios Spring concert in March, 2003.

Compressed 96kbps MP3 of a short performance.

Screenshot of the visual interface projected during performance.

Cafiaspirina - Graham Wakefield, Chile, January 2003

Between agitation and desensitisation, chaos and stasis, lie the engaging regions of complex activity.    Perceptually, as a signal approaches indeterminacy, our minds must work harder to structurally capture it, yet the more freedom is granted for the imagination to explore it. Cafiaspirina was composed to explore such noisy boundary regions , but not be drowned by them; that the soundscape produced be not just confusing but also perhaps fascinating, pleasant or surprising.

I chose to compose with streams of sound with enough internal complexity and energy dynamics to reveal discrete or quasi-discrete objects within, using the following processes:

• Rapid metric amplitude modulations traverse the continuum between perceivable structure at simpler and slower polyrhythms through progressively more complex and faster tempi to a point where the structure is perceived instead as a microsonic texture.  
• A complex algorithmically driven spectral dynamics processor confuses tonality and spectral content: wandering narrowband filters may widen and shift to disorient formants, then shimmer across the full spectrum before shifting rapidly in even spacings to create barber-pole like spectral rhythms.
• Granulation further engenders confusion regarding the physicality of the sound, smoothly morphing between changing densities, textures, scales of time and spectral contents.
• The structure of the DSP graph is flexible and changing during the piece, both continuously and discretely, as a further instability.

Certain aspects of the composition (the homogeneity of the source sound, the semblance of steady meter) act as a necessarily stable foil to the above destabilizing transformations.   Using all these processes, the degree of stability and unpredictability oscillates gesturally throughout the piece, with the objective to express apparent intent and integrity, without graspable form.

The piece exists in a mobile form for real-time improvised performance, with a visualized projection (see the image above).   The visualization represents the shifting patterns of the various transformation parameters employed in the work in a designed, factual yet somewhat indecipherable manner akin to medical product packaging as the composition is d edicated to the pharmaceutical of the same name, popular in South America, distributed by the Bayer Group Plc.   It has been performed by the author in concerts at Goldmiths' College University of London, and at the University of California Santa Barbara.

[Cafiaspirina is a pharmaceutical complex of Caffeine and Aspirin popular throughout South America, produced by the Bayer Group. I encountered it being sold through vending machines in the Santiago metro.]

Bibliography

Roads, Curtis, 1996: The Computer Music Tutorial (Cambridge: MIT Press).

Roads, Curtis, 2001: Microsound (Cambridge: MIT Press).

Wishart, Trevor, 1996: On Sonic Art (London: Routledge).