Browse Items (868 total)

• Reveal

  
  
  Deconstructing an instrument is a revelation, because it unsettles the myth, causing a change in the listeners’ perception. The guitar is the source for all the sounds presented in this piece, which emphasizes the ones that have been hidden by the instrument’s technique and repertory, or unnoticed due to their low volume.
  
  The recorded part of this piece reveals guitar sounds that normally are not clearly audible in a concert room. The computer enables processing the recordings, in order to enhance or highlight parts of the spectrum, timbres, and percussive elements.
  
  The breakage may result in a complete dysfunctional instrument, when the main resources for producing sounds are prevented by this organized malfunction.
  
  Reveal is a noun and a verb, and the piece expresses both meanings, because it reveals the rich universe of resources denied by the traditional technique and provides a new possible listening to a guitar, when the listener might achieve a whole new comprehension of the instrument—the piece brings to light a sub-known universe of sounds that was present, but not understood.

• 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.

• Green Shake

  A composition used Electronic music, Visual element and Interactive between performers and audience.
  
  Interactive of visual, aural and body movements is the idea of this one. Performers are audiences (to watch), audiences are conductors (perform), two groups are interacting based on a dialogue of visual and aural, answer each other by sounds (movements).

• No Entry After Dark

• LOAM

• minim

• and drift

• Effusion

  micro-collage, polystylism, rock, electronica; 2 channel recording
  
  In “Pleasure Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Current Electronic Music”, Ben Neill describes how popular and art music are distinguished along rhythmic lines. He predicts a future music where such distinctions are less clear; where the rhythmic vernacular of pop music is spoken in artistic territory. Much of my recent creative compositional efforts, including this piece, exemplify movement in this direction, both in terms of rhythm as well as other musical elements. Here, a foundation is set with materials from the pop world: verse-chorus form, 4/4 time signatures, fuzzy synth basses, rock grooves and EDM breaks. These materials are then manipulated in electroacoustic-art-music ways: timbres are transformed, grains are made and re-ordered, meters are changed, and earlier materials are restated in discontinuous sequences. The result is less a fusion and more a congeries where non-ironic choruses and dizzying jump-cuts cohabitate. These combinations are not motivated by a desire to influence the language of art music for its own sake, rather, they are expressions of cultural heterogeneity that is not compartmentalized.

• adagio for piano and soundplane

• mesospherics

  red sprites, blue jets, noctilucent clouds, whistling air, diffuse, faraway haze
  
  In the mesosphere – too high for aircraft and too low for spacecraft – fleeting electrical phenomena like red sprites, blue jets and noctilucent clouds consistently elude careful study. Higher still, in the thermosphere, are gas molecules that vibrate furiously in isolation, superheated by the sun but so thinly spaced that they cannot collide with one another to properly constitute a gas. Mesospherics musically inhabits these strange, poorly understood places. The piece uses ambisonic spatialization techniques to situate a wide variety of sounds, both processed and synthetic, in a very large three-dimensional virtual space. Some of these have clear images attached, such as the whistling air sounds of the opening, while others have less concrete associations. Some are fixed in place, articulate and very close, while others resemble a diffuse, faraway haze, and still others fly rapidly and brilliantly through space. But all of these sounds are highly fragmented and elusive, much like the fascinating and bizarre phenomena we observe in the earth’s upper atmosphere.