Browse Items (868 total)

• Music for Six Instruments and Prepared Tape

  7 distinct taped segments, recorded from an EMS "Putney" VCS 3 synthesizer. Premiered September 27, 1973 by the University of Denver Woodwind Quintet. Additional performances at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

• Music, Walk with Me

  My musical work Music, Walk With Me sonifies data in response to my starting timbral and textural pointillistic musical concept of a few simultaneous sine waves. What interested me was how the sound of a chord could change based on changing volumes of its notes.. I imagined music with a slow tempo that would analyze a chord from different viewpoints, or “soundpoints.”
  
  I preferred to collect a data set that related to my life. After about a week of hard thinking I realized the answer was sitting in my pocket: I’d been collecting my own data set for over a year now with the Samsung S Health app, a step counter on my phone. The two primary parts of the data are daily and hourly steps taken. I thus had a number for frequency and for amplitude. While the information captured has itself become more and more interesting to me, I am still most proud of how I have expressed it artistically. To create chords, this piece draws on data created by myself and 3 friends. The four of us together thus create fluctuating harmony just by walking (i.e., by having walked). I mapped the data as such: for each day, every person is represented by only one pitch, which changes in volume based on quantized temporal averages. Walking 10,000 steps will therefore yield a tone of 1,000 Hz with a static pitch but a subtly or dramatically changing volume.
  
  Time is compressed in this piece in both its concert and installation forms. Moving through each day, 1 second represents one hour. A whole month of 30 days will thus last exactly 12 minutes.

• Mussems Sång

  Material from EMS synthesizer in Stockholm, Sweden and artificial voice created on Johann Sundberg's voice synthesizer called 'Musse.'

• Mystification

  Mystification is an exploration of the juxtaposition between simplicity/complexity, consonance/dissonance, and clarity/distortion. This piece consists of two contradictory trajectories. The acoustic instruments move from a highly complex and dissonant texture to a relatively simple and consonant one. At the same time, the computer processing begins by simply amplifying the instruments. Over the course of the piece the computer begins to alter the sounds of the instruments, processing them with increasing complexity. The result is a kind of mirror form with different versions of simplicity/complexity, consonance/dissonance, and clarity/distortion at either end.

• Mythical Spaces

  Mythical Spaces explores the intersection of myth and place. Mythical spaces are imaginary, real, natural and human-made. They are the sites of mythical events and bridges to the spiritual world. Sonically, Mythical Spaces captures the essence of each space as well as its mythical significance by reproducing material physicality through the use of a different featured “vessel” in each movement.

  i) Underground
  People and gods used to live underground until they emerged from the depths and into our world. These myths are prevalent in the American southwest as well as the Trobriand Islands. This movement explores the idea of the subterranean world as primordial, where the emergence into our world represents a journey from darkness to light.

  ii) Water
  The “earth-diver” myth, where a being dives to the bottom of the ocean to grab a particle of sand that will be used to create the Earth is one of the most diffuse and common origin myths in the world. This movement sonically retells the narrative of the creation of the Earth—from a single particle to shimmering harmonic landscape.

  iii) Forest
  From Sub-Saharan Africa to Japan, forests are viewed as sacred by cultures worldwide. Animist beliefs imbue the individual elements of the forest with living spirits. These forests may be viewed as natural temples, places where humans can enter the supernatural world. Wind rustling through the trees and an environment rich with the energy of spirits pervade this movement.

  iv) Mountain
  Valhalla, Mt. Everest, Mt. Olympus, Mt. Denali, and Mt. Fuji are examples of mythical and real mountains that are considered sacred. Mountains are home to the gods. Evoking a sense of heroism, this movement contains the sounds of dramatic rumbling gestures broadcast over great distances.

  v) Temple
  Earthly temples have their duplicates in the transcendental sphere—the heavens. The temple represents the efforts of more centralized societies (more “civilized” in the non-pejorative sense) to build a bridge to a mythical place. This movement employs sounds of sacred instruments and a strong element of ritual that constructs a ceremony of transcendence.

  Mythical Spaces was written in 2010 for percussionist Shawn Savageau.

• N'air sur le lit

• Name Droppings

  2-, 4-, & 8-channel mixes available

  Published on audio CD: In Celebration of the 50^th Anniversary of the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios (1958-2008), 2008.

• Narita Airport Rock

  Source material recorded in Tokyo, Japan.

• Neoga

• Neurosonics I

  ambisonic spatialization of sounds from firing neurons
  
  Neurosonics I is the first outgrowth of a collaboration I did with neuroscience graduate student Tahra Eissa, supported by the Arts|Science Initiative at the Logan Center for the Arts. Tahra’s lab runs experiments that study the electrical behavior of cultured rat neurons, and uses these data in the study of epilepsy. All of the sounds in the piece bear some relationship to the neuron activity: the pulses of raw noise that murmur at the opening are direct sonifications, while the unstable vibrating sounds use the neuron activity to manipulate filtering and some spectral frequencies. There are also drum sounds: Tahra plays percussion with the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, and she had previously noticed a relationship between certain drumming patterns and the electrical activity in the experiments. So I recorded her playing a handful of these patterns on her darabukka. All of these sounds float together in three-dimensional space, eventually combining into a maelstrom of activity. Neurosonics does not directly describe the epileptic experience, but I do have a personal connection to it, as I was diagnosed with a mild form of the condition 11 years ago.