Compressed 96kbps MP3.
This web-page documents an extended plunderphonic composition, submitted as one third of the author's final portfolio for the Masters in Music, Composition (Studio) at Goldsmiths College, University of London on 17th June 2004. The composition was premiered at the Goldsmiths College Electronic Music Studios autumn concert on October 20, 2004.
Spectrogram of complete composition (0-22khz grayscale); time-domain
waveform overlaid (red):
Compressed 96kbps MP3.
Following a suggestion by the tutors earlier in the course, I began a plunderphonic exercise based on classic early electroacoustic works. The investigation into this work led to some quite interesting conceptual, technological and musical developments in my work, culminating in this presented project.
The term ‘plunderphonic’ was coined by John Oswald to describe composing using other people’s recordings of music as source material (note that, unlike ‘sampling’, no attempt is made to conceal the source, on the contrary, plunderphonic pieces often pay tribute to the source material or artists, through homage, pastiche etc.): “The moniker comes from a paper he gave to the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985, titled ‘Plunderphonics, or audio piracy as a compositional prerogative.’” (Gans, 1995).
The works I have used as source material in this piece are Steve Reich’s Come Out (1967), and Jean-Claude Risset’s Mutations I (1969). My intention was to pay tribute to these works by treating the material in kind with the ideas that had originally inspired and produced them, so I shall begin with a short overview of these works.
Steve Reich - Come Out (1967)
After working alongside Terry Riley on his In C (1964), Steve Reich was keen to “find some new way of working with repetition as a musical technique. [His] first thought was to play one loop against itself in some particular relationship…” (Reich, 2002: 20). Working with tape loops of spoken word phrases, he by chance “discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops up in unison, and then letting them slowly drift out of phase with one another“ (ibid. 20).
Come Out is a tape piece consisting of the above phasing process spread over
around thirteen minutes, using two, four and eventually eight tape loops of
the spoken phrase “come out to show them” (see Figure 1). The piece is preceded
by three repetitions of the full source sentence.
Jean-Claude Risset – Mutations I (1969)
One of the earliest works to be composed and created entirely using the computer, and the first to feature John Chowning’s FM synthesis, Mutations I presents (superficially at least) a completely abstract, otherworldly soundscape.
The opening three gestures of Mutations hint at the driving ideas behind of the piece as a whole. The piece begins with a melody (D’, C#, Bb, A’, E’), followed by a chord made of these same tones played simultaneously with a slow attack and release envelope, and finally by a different arrangement of these same pitches each with distinct envelopes, producing a gong-like sound. Risset here demonstrates the ambiguity between melody, harmony and timbre, simply by manipulating the time/amplitude curves of these five tones. There is some indication in the selection of pitches too: both from the D’ to the C#, and from the Bb to the A’, the interval is a major 7th. The near-octave interval is suggestive of the rising/falling pitch illusions to come later in the work.
The piece continues with various transformations of these basic materials, mostly through the manipulation of pitch, amplitude and filter modulations, generally exploring the dissolution of discrete pitches into timbre continua.
As both Come Out and Mutations have a strong methodological basis to both sonic surface and composition, I aimed to follow in suit by finding similar areas of concern behind both, and attempt to recreate, fuse and further explore these ideas. Broadly speaking, I found that the single most unifying factor between the two is an almost didactic exposition of the internal details of sonic phenomena through gradual transformation and/or degradation, and the consequent generation of musical structure. Put another way, both can be seen to be directing attention to the act of listening itself by unfolding processes or sounds.
This is perhaps most obvious when considering the phasing process in Come Out. Initially in-phase, both loops are heard as a single sound, but as the tape loops gradually drift apart (which Reich controlled with slight manual adjustments to the playback speeds), a variety of different aural effects are produced. The smallest phase differences lead to spectral phasing, emphasizing different frequency components of the sound, then slightly larger phase differences result in apparent reverberation. As the phase difference continues to increase, another threshold is crossed and the effect becomes increasingly rhythmic, forming different time relationships, which expand into a kind of canon/ronda form.
“Phasing of the two words ‘come out’ itself produces identifiable motivic developments: ‘co-ma-ma’, ‘co-ma-ma-ma’ and ‘co-ma-ma-ma-ma’, for instance, each change in rhythm and emphasis resulting from the gradual process of canonic realignment. ” (Potter, 2002: 177).
Interestingly, the transformations of different elements of the source material appear to be perceived in different manners. Peter Manning for example describes how the “phasing effect gradually introduces echo effects for the shorter elements such as ‘c’ and ‘t’, whilst the longer ones become extended” (Manning, 1985: 184), and Keith Potter expounds in more detail some of the different sonic and structural consequences of the phasing process:
“The ‘sh’ of the word ‘show’ contains a percussive element – many have compared it to maracas – which allows not merely timbral variety but also provides a starting point for more subtle manipulation of the material, as the ‘sh’ sound swoops the whole spectrum. In other words, the sounds themselves have become more divorced from their meaning… Just after eight minutes in, the four-voice canon in quavers then splits, quite dramatically, into eight voices in semiquavers. This produces a kind of shimmer or blur lasting some five minutes, in which the words have become completely inaudible. The words ‘come out’ now yield a kind of soft, rounded burr, while ‘to show them’ has been transformed into alternating pulses of machine-like ferocity” (Potter, 2002: 177-178).
The structure allows the listener to hear and understand the process as it unfolds, whilst the message is gradually distorted as the ability to discern the words is slowly removed. Reich appears to be directing attention from the speech as speech, towards the appreciation of the sonic properties of the speech as sound, and the musical properties of the process. This single process, simultaneously transforming the sonic timbre and defining the musical structure is almost marvelously demonstrated through the gradual exposition.
“As I listened to this gradual phase shifting process, I began to realize that it was an extraordinary form of musical structure. This process struck me as a way of going through a number of relationships between two identities without ever having any transitions. It was a seamless, uninterrupted musical process.” (Reich, 2002: 20).
The source material came from interviews with the ‘Harlem Six’, “a group of black teenagers arrested for the murder of a white shop-owner during the New York riots of 1964. Although the choice of a documentary source with a political basis was a conscious decision (the piece as commissioned was to be performed benefit concert), these were not the only concerns in the choice of material:
“REICH: The material was selected from ten hours of tape… in the course of going through all this material, that little phrase, come out to show them, was chosen. I was combing through this stuff trying to find the juiciest phrase I could get, because I realized that that’s where it was at: to get raw speech material that really had musical content, and then go from there.” (Duckworth, 1995: 297).
Jean-Claude Risset is acutely concerned with listening as a psychological phenomenon, and has often used sonic illusions as a means to demonstrate distinctions between the sonic and the auditory, both in his writings and compositions. In his article ‘The Perception of Musical Sound’, he paraphrases Purkinje: “Illusions are errors of the senses but truths of perception” (Risset, 2004 3). Risset warns of the dangers of overlooking the listener in music creation: “In so far as music is meant to be heard, what counts is the relations we hear, not the relations we stipulate between physical parameters which our ear does not measure or appreciate directly.” (Risset, 1996: 32-33).
It is this psychological interest in synthesis that lead to his use of paradoxes or illusions in his elecroacoustic works. Mutations in particular contains a number of instances of the Shepard/Risset tone illusion, a kind of aural ‘barber-pole’ effect, in which the apparent pitch of the tone may move independently of the spectral center of the sound; thus and ascending tone may move from higher frequencies to lower frequencies!
“Psychologist Roger Shepard discovered that the apparent register of tones in musical scales could be made ambiguous by carefully controlling the amplitude of the partials of the tones. Shepard produced scales that were perceived as ‘circular’ in pitch – while appearing to move continuously in one direction along the scale, they actually never left the register in which they began. Risset extended this principle to achieve the same effect with glissandoing tones as well... He used the design and other closely related ones in his composition, Mutations I.” (Dodge, 1997: 106).
The opening gestures of Mutations are show the continuity between melody, harmony and timbre; by using different articulations of the same pitches, they are first heard as a melodic sequence, then a unified chord, and finally as a fused timbre. While perhaps not so immediately obvious as the Shepard tone illusion, this illustrative approach (which is echoed throughout the piece) is still intended to expose the details of (musical) sounds through transformation and articulation, and thus bring awareness to processes of listening.
“Since his earliest work in computer music, Risset has shown an ability to find sonically interesting textures that can be realized uniquely by digital synthesis. Risset then builds compositions around these techniques in such a way that the compositional structure and sonic surface are inseparably intertwined. A good example of a composition in which instrument design and compositional structure serve to support each other is Risset’s Mutations I…. ” (Dodge, 1997: 108).
Following Risset’s approach, I constructed two processing tools in the form of Max/MSP patches (Zicarelli 2002) to achieve different variations on the marriage of concepts and transformations from the two source works. The use of these tools was directed by the aims of the composition as a whole, in order to achieve particular relationships or effects, however allowing the resultant sonic materials to indicate where possible the direction of the final arrangement.
Figure 3. Dual voice phase-looping patch with polyrhythm and independent filters
The first patch I constructed takes a short segment from the source work (Come Out or Mutations), of usually between 300ms and 1500ms in duration, played back as loops to each of two output channels. A variation is possible between the respective lengths of these loops, enabling the phasing effect of Come Out to be recreated. I then expanded this tool by permitting larger relationships (both harmonic and inharmonic) between the loop lengths, resulting in polyrhythmic or evolving textures.
To fuse this phasing process with an influence from Mutations, I introduced a kind of ‘barber pole’ aspect by allowing the onset point within the source sample for each loop to also drift gradually; hence the actual looped sound heard may gradually progress and transform through the source work (Gaussian windowing and loop cross fading were used to smoothen this process). Low-pass and high-pass filters are used on the two respective channels to allow further spectral shaping of the loops over time.
The audible result is perhaps better demonstrated than explained: the effect of this patch can be heard very clearly near the beginning of the piece (1:50” to 2:25”) where the voice appears to transform from ‘shoulder to shoulder‘ through ‘co-show them’ through ‘come on then’ to ‘push ‘em out’ and finally ‘show out’. Elsewhere I make more gestural use of this patch by rapidly changing the selected region within the source work (particularly noticeable around 13:10” for instance). This tool was used to generate the majority of the material in the composition.
Figure 3. Dual voice phase-looping patch with polyrhythm and independent filters
The second patch constructed aimed to recreate the Shepard tone effect, however
instead of using many parallel pure sine tones, the effect is achieved by using
many parallel granular streams acting upon the source sample. The grains are
layered in a cloud form, with grain pitch based on a random register but a
defined pitch class, and grain amplitude based on the relationship between
ideal register and actual register to correctly create the Shepard illusion.
Although the audible result is not as cleanly achieved as with sine tones,
and is highly dependent upon the source sample being granulated, the paradoxical
illusion is still clearly evident. For example, the gesture between 7:25” and
8:05” maintains a static pitch class as the register descends, slowly revealing
the source phrase playing at a normal rate, whilst in the gesture between 8:00”
and 8:35” the pitch class descends as the register ascends (the source phrase
being ‘frozen’ mid-phrase throughout); both gestures using Come Out as source
material.
This granular patch was also used to explore the source materials in other detailed ways (for instance for time-stretching, noticeable between 10:00” and 11:30”, or for brassage (a kind of granular shuffling, see Risset 2002: 94), used at the very beginning of the piece.
The usage of these tools was in part directed by my understanding of the ideas of both Reich and Risset, but it was just as much directed by the sonic properties of the source works themselves. Mutations provides a much richer set of source material to work with, and hence contributed more to the total sound of the presented composition.
As both works come from very different sound worlds (one clearly an acoustic recording of a voice, the other very clearly synthetic), interesting challenges arise in their juxtaposition. Again I could draw inspiration from Risset’s exploratory-didactic approach:
“I am interested in confronting – fusing or contrasting – two different worlds of sounds: the acoustic world, which is the sonic aspect of external reality, and the synthetic world, which is mere auditory appearance, but which takes presence and identity in our consciousness through perceptual operations that were originally favored by evolution, in so far as they provided hints about external reality. Perhaps I have set up encounters between these two worlds in a groping attempt to revive and ignite archaic and forgotten relations between the world inside us and the world around us. (Risset, 1996: 45)
Risset follows the functional, gestalt models of psychoacoustics to claim that our hearing is not designed to discover physical properties of sounds, but to provide useful, functional information about the environment; and these same directed processes are used to listen to synthetic sounds.
“In using the computer as a source of musical material, my aesthetic goal was certainly not to realize digital ersatz of acoustic sounds. However, I often synthesized simulacra, imitating by synthesis certain musical instruments or the human voice as well as other sounds…” (Risset, 1996: 29).
The presented composition begins with the simulacra of a ringing phone – later revealed to be the opening melodic gesture of Mutations subject to brassage. A recorded voice begins “I had to…” but does not conclude. Three repetitions of this couplet echo the threefold repetition/gesture openings of both Come Out and Mutations. The ringing phone as sound icon calls for attention, the voice implies the imperative; however the attentive requirement of the telephone ‘call’ receives its response in the form of a scratchy digital signal, straining the ears for form, which is slowly shown to be the very same opening material of Mutations and Come Out also subject to brassage and phase-looping. The piece continues to intertwine developments of the phasing process on both source works, introducing polyrhythmic organization of the loops, whilst a more gestural use of the granular tool connects the distinct evolving soundscapes.
At around 5:40” the balance between intensity and complexity softens, and as the use of the processing tools becomes less didactic, stranger timbres begin to emerge. Just as Reich gradually destroys the intelligibility of the speech in Come Out, and Risset intended to demonstrate the transformation from distinct pitches into continuous spectra through Mutations, the sonic materials in this piece are progressively transformed further from source recognition.
Apart from the use of sonic illusions already described, there are a number of perceptually inspired techniques used in this piece; for example distinct streams are merged by masking (for example between 2:35” and 3:05”), and spatial illusions introduced at times through small phase and frequency deviations based on Doppler effects (for example between 12:10” and 12:30”). Between 10:00” and 11:20” the granulation of both Come Out and Mutations is synchronized, playing on the perceptual tendency to identify movements of ‘common fate’ as unified.
Both Reich and Risset emphasize the importance of listening in the exploration of sounds: phasing and repetition allows listener a deeper listening experience to explore the source sound, Risset’s re-use of basic elements to show continuity between melody, harmony and timbre, and the illusions to highlight awareness. There is an emphasis on transforming or arranging the sounds in order to further expose their interior, their textures and structures.
Interestingly, John Oswald’s inspiration to transform existing compositions also came from a desire to explore and discover their internal structures, ultimately for the benefit of others’ appreciation:
"’I started off as a listener,’ says Oswald, ‘but like most kids, I had a short attention span.’… Over time, Oswald made himself into an ‘active’ listener. ‘I'd play 33_ rpm LPs of classical music at 78 rpm, and - lo and behold - the structure would come into focus in an aural version of an overview.’ Listening to Stravinsky's ‘Rite of Spring’ at 78 rpm ‘gave it the edge I imagined it must have had to upset people in 1913.’ … ‘I'd listen to be-bop slow,’ Oswald says. ‘Charlie Parker would sound like a beluga whale, but I could begin to hear how he put a solo together. That's something a lot of jazz musicians have done… ‘I was doing a kind of manipulative listening in fairly complex ways, and as my interactive listening habits grew more complex, I began to think of ways to preserve them for other people to hear.’" (Gans, 1995).
There is an intriguing parallel here: by treating Come Out and Mutations in kind with their own methods and ideals in a kind of plunderphonic presentation of directed listening, I hope to have revealed perspectives on both their inner sonic details, and on the very same methods and ideals behind them.
Bregman, Albert, 1990: Auditory Scene Analysis (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Dodge, Charles & Jerse, Thomas, 1997: Computer Music, 2nd edn (New York:
Schirmer Books).
Duckworth, William, 1995: Talking Music (New York: Schirmer Books).
Gans, David, 1995: ‘The Man Who Stole Micheal Jackson’s Face’, in Wired Issue
3.02, web source: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.02/oswald.html
Manning, Peter, 1985: Electronic and Computer Music (Oxford: Clarendon).
Potter, Keith, 2002: Four Musical Minimalists (Cambridge University Press).
Reich, Steve, 2002: Writings on Music (Oxford University Press).
Risset, Jean-Claude, 1989: ‘Paradoxical Sounds’, in Current Directions in Computer
Music Research, ed. Max Mathews & John Pierce, (Cambridge: MIT Press),
pp149-158.
Risset, Jean-Claude, 1996: ‘Real-World Sounds and Simulacra in my Computer
Music’, Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 15, Part 1, pp. 29-47.
Risset, Jean-Claude, 2002: ‘Examples of the Musical Use of Digital Audio Effects’
in Journal of New Musical Research, Vol. 31, No. 2., pp. 93-97.
Risset, Jean-Claude, 2004 The Perception of Musical Sound, web source: www.utexas.edu/cola/france-ut/archives/risset.pdf
Zicarelli, David, 2002: "How I Learned to Love a Program That Does Nothing." Computer
Music Journal Vol. 26, No. 4, pp44-51.
Jean-Claude Risset, Mutations I, (INA/GRM 1970), AM 564 09 (LP)
Steve Reich, Come Out, (Elektra Nonesuch 1966), 79169-2