Browse Items (868 total)
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inChuck
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.
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Funnel Cloud
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.
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Protect Your Domain Name
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. -
Fading Out
Algorithmic Lullaby -
One Minute On The Surface Of The Sun
A Sonification Of Gamma Rays and Sine Waves