COMPEL Omeka Dev

Browse Items (868 total)

  • 2- or 4-channel mixes available

    Published on 60×60 Pacific Rim Mix, 2012
  • 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.
  • Cataclysmic textural narrative

    Meridian (2014) is an attempt at a sort of textural narrative. Through abstract sound events I attempted to form a palpable sonic environment and a warped sense of physicality/presence, allowing listeners to derive their own individual settings, stories, and sensations temporally anchored and guided by a mixture of tradition composition and sound design elements, providing an immersive cinematic experience.
  • A short fixed media work
  • Recorded in Spaulding Auditorium, Dartmouth College, at the Festival of New Musics, May 2, 2000.
  • 2-, 4-, & 8-channel TimeLines available

    Published on audio CD: Ghost Strings, Patricia Strange , violin. IMG Media, CD-02-01, 2006.s

  • “Democracy is lovely, but baseball is more mature.” – Richard Greenberg

    In my never ending search for formal models which paradoxically display properties of randomness and asymmetry yet completeness and structure, I turned to baseball. The skeleton of this piece (although it wouldn’t be apparent unless I told you) is derived from a scorecard I kept of a Cubs/Cardinals game. The title references what one commentator refers to as “a move which has worked once in the last twenty years” – the Look to Third, throw to first. In homage to the many paradoxes that lie latent within the game of baseball (for example, it’s a pastoral game with urban roots) there is a second possible, more literal, reading of the title. This is music which is inspired by the features of sculpture, the art form which dwells in the third dimension and utilizes space, volume and perspective. Baseball is often described as poetry in motion, and any true fan of the game can speak to this point for hours as they describe the beauty and intricacies of watching an infield in motion as a ball is perfectly bunted down the line or the excitement of judging whether a throw from the outfield will beat out a runner at the plate. These motions through space become the narrative, the story of each game. Every baseball game has 9 innings, 27 outs per team, yet each game, each story is different and unique. It is these aspects of the game that this piece tries to capture, for each movement, with the aid of electronics, presents essentially the same structural narrative but in a unique way, from a unique physical perspective. Imaging how the same musical materials would react and resonate as they move through different physical spaces guided the creation of this piece, and is the way in which the piece “looks to third” for inspiration – I’m still working on the throw to first.

Output Formats

atom, dcmes-xml, json, omeka-xml, rss2