Browse Items (868 total)

• Tintinnabuli: an algorithm

  This Max/MSP patch has been designed to commemorate Arvo Pärt on his 80th birthday. The “tintinnabuli” style that Pärt has become known for has had a lasting impression on me as a composer, especially in “rule-based” or algorithmic composition.

• Zelik

  On a Yiddish folk song. The fixed media for this piece was created by progressive equalization of triadic accordion samples, in addition to fully-composed klezmer fiddle and organ excerpts.

• a sense of who

  Recorded by the Bang on a Can festival at MassMoCa on July 27, 2015. Instrumentation is for fixed media, clarinet, electric guitar, cello, bass, piano, and drums. The fixed media track features Evan Chambers, folk singer.
  
  (c) Annika K. Socolofsky 2015. ASCAP. All rights reserved.
  
  About the piece:
  
  “I find that people who come from small places have a very
  strong sense of who they are.” – Nic Gareiss
  
  I have never come from a small place. I’ve spent my life jumping around from Edinburgh, to Chicago, to Pittsburgh—city after city after city. But in 2012, for the first time in my life, I moved to a smaller place. In Ann Arbor, Michigan my fiddle and I were swallowed, heads-first, into the traditional Irish music scene. Showing up to familiar faces and tunes and conversation at Conor O’Neill’s on Main St. every Sunday night provided a sense of community I’d never before experienced.
  
  Over the last few years, there’s been this microscopic point inside of me that has started to grow. That point is that sense of belonging, that sense of friendship, that sense of love, that sense of community, that sense of grounding, that inkling of a sense of who… It’s been growing. And that is everything.

• Infernum: Images from the Solar Dynamic Observatory

  While Infernum is 100% an electronic work, its surface texture recalls acoustic instruments in real spaces — transformed and heightened in ways only possible through digital means. Fleeting moments of nervous calm alternate with a terrifying wall of brass glissandi (up to 60 trombones!), creating the effect of a fear-response oscillating between the conscious and subconscious.

• Amplifying Altitude

  site-specific, multi-channel, immersive installation

• Moment of First Awakening

  In the spring of 1985, conductor Clive Wearing suffered from a virus that attacked his brain’s ability to form short-term memories. He was left with less than 2 minutes of recall at any given time.
  
  To this day, Clive keeps a journal in a stilted attempt to record his existence:
  
  8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
  9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
  9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.
  
  Clive lives in a perpetual state of temporary standby. His entire awareness is limited to a tiny window of time — a momentary gap that creates for him a continuous moment of first awakening.

• Interlude

• Sonification Study No. 1: Music from the Isomer Project

  By deconstructing the sonic features of a recorded sound and applying a model-based musical framework to the result, it’s possible to re-imagine the original audio in an instrumental context.