4-channel audio with visual projection, duration: 7'05"
Graham Wakefield, May 2004 / October 2005
Excerpts:
Presented at the WAVE*PULSE CREATE concert, Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, University of California Santa Barbara on November 10, 2005.
This piece is about taking things away. Given ten diverse but anonymous location recordings, I selected broad segments to remove from each, retaining only the leftovers for further transformation and arrangement. In turn the residual sounds are sculpted using micro-segmentation in the time domain, and spectral gating in the frequency domain, reducing diversity whilst gaining gestural control. The selective removal continued to the macro-scale; I began removing sections from the arrangement arbitrarily, leaving empty space in their absence. The referential origins of the sounds have not been concealed, but nor have their 'broken' edits. Instead they retain a mimetic physicality in their gestures, allowing them to function in playfully musical forms around natural references. Each part of the piece approaches this grey area in a different way.
The visualisation is a variant of a Lissajous or Harmonograph figure, in which the sonic waveforms are directly mapped onto horizontal and vertical displacements of short line segments onscreen. My thanks to Lance Putnam for inspiration regarding this algorithm.
Screen captures (click to view at double size):
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The composition was originally written during the author's study of a Masters in Music, Composition (Studio) at Goldsmiths College, University of London - more details here. The visualisation algorithm was written during the author's study of a Masters of Arts in Media Arts and Technology at the University of California Santa Barbara - more details here.