COMPEL Omeka Dev

Browse Items (868 total)

  • The Tunnel of Quantum Love (2015) portrays the theory that an atom can be in many places simultaneously. The initial sound journeys through many states: gaseous shimmers, through warped high speeds, distorted slow motion, chaos, and unnamed atmospheres. Maybe one day we will discover the Tunnel of Quantum Love and experience this simultaneity ourselves.

  • VVR was composed during my residency at the 2013 Festival de Internacional de Inverno UFSM in Vale Vêneto, Brasil.  All of the sounds in the piece were collected, processed and recomposed during the week-long festival. I am personally fond of two specific sounds. The first is the siren, which came from the town police car. Near the end of our sound walk that day, one of the students went up to the policeman and asked if he would play the siren so that we could record it.  The policeman was reluctant at first, and I didn’t want to cause any kind of commotion. But he went ahead and played the siren, much to the delight of the kids in the town square.

    The other sound is the background “pop” music heard near the end of the piece. The winter festival coincides with the Italian Heritage festival in Vale Vêneto, and the town plays a variety of Italian pop/folk songs across loudspeakers throughout the town square.  You can hear it almost everywhere outside, and it is a persistent part of the audio landscape.  I felt it was impossible to create a soundscape of the town without it.

  • inChucK (2010, v3 2011) is an homage and recomposition of the minimalist masterpiece In C by Terry Riley, written specifically for laptop orchestras. As with In C, each performer has a series of musical snippets to play, in sequence with some discretion as to when, octave, loudness, and for how long. Against this backdrop is a constant percussive pulse that fades into the musical fabric created by the mini-sequences.

    While this is clearly an homage to the Riley work, it also is designed to be a metaphor for grid-based distributed computing, where a single computational problem is split between many computers scattered across a network – a “computational grid” in scientific terms. Each player receives messages from a master computer telling them to run a computer process or script. They run the script based on the environment that they are in (both musically and physically) and add additional processes as needed. The master computer continues to send messages throughout the piece, guiding the individual computers through the sequence of steps that defines the total composition. Each musical fragment is in fact a computer process, with a start and an end, and configurable parameters that determine the length the process runs and the pitch register of musical output. This piece is meant to articulate the concept and process of grid computing through the laptop orchestra as a reflection of its conceptual and aesthetic beauty.

  • Funnel Cloud explores the relationship between artifice and reality through the metaphor of a tornado. After the tornado rumbles through a small village, a lone survivor wanders into an art gallery only to find the paintings coming to life with a dancing man, swirling jazz and aboriginal incantations. The last image in the gallery is surprisingly a painting of a tornado that comes to life, grabbing the survivor and drawing him into the artistic netherworld.

    The music in Funnel Cloud plays an important role in representing the various states of the art vs. reality paradigm. The tornado sounds are all synthetic while the sounds within the gallery are transformations of familiar music. Inversions of “Dorothy’s arrival in Oz theme” from The Wizard of Oz carry the survivor through the various exhibits in the art gallery. Reversed jazz, vocal music from Bali and odd transformations of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantstique bring the individual paintings to life. The question of what is real and what is synthetic is ironically presented through music, image and transformation.

    Funnel Cloud received the Animation Award from the 11th Annual Louisiana Video Shorts Festival (1999) in New Orleans, LA.

  • Protect Your Domain Name was commissioned by the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication for a conference on business communication. Poet Ava Haymon collaborated with the conception of the work, contributing found techno-babble from the World Wide Web, and excerpts from her poem “The Word”, which parodies the use and misuse of language for religious and political discourse. Protect Your Domain Name raises the issues of identity and anonymity on the internet, and the embodiment and manipulation of meaning within words that are both conversant and unspeakable.

    The music/sound design of the piece took recitations by Ms. Haymon of the found techno-babble and recomposed their temporal, spectral and pitch contours. The transformations were done independent of one another and then assembled in collaboration with animator Michael Daugherty. The interaction between sound and image was organically derived through a regular interchange between artist and composer. All of the sounds were derived from those recordings.

  • Algorithmic Lullaby

  • A Sonification Of Gamma Rays and Sine Waves

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If you see an error or would like to add content to COMPEL, please leave a comment or contact Hollis Wittman at hollisw@vt.edu.