Browse Items (868 total)

• Below the written pitches of Brian Ferneyhough's Superscriptio for solo piccolo

  Another installment in my found soundscape series; Below the written pitches spectrally extracts sound beneath the written pitches of Brian Ferneyhough's Superscriptio for solo piccolo to reveal recording anomalies, latent undertones, and mechanical noises.

• Deckle

  Stridulating, dub-like glitch with tilting planes of reverb and echo. Deckle was created as a pocket remix for Wyndel Hunt's album Sunshine Noir released in 2010 by Dragon's Eye Recordings.

• Live at the Third Practice Festival - November 2, 2013

  Held at the University of Richmond in Virginia, Third Practice is an annual festival devoted to adventurous acoustic and electronic music. See www.thirdpractice.org for details. Live and unedited with no post-performance processing or overdubs: I improvised a short set in AudioMulch layering, mixing, and processing acoustic and electromagnetic field recordings.

• Laniakea

• "Real-Time Processing Improv"

  real-time signal processing of improvisers

• Where Water Meets Memory

• Composite and Parallax

  Composite and Parallax, for alto sax, percussion, and immersive audio, complements the instrumentation of Bent Frequency Duo with a electronic sound palette of what I imagine to be a surreal, giant non-pitched iron instrument surrounding the audience. Throughout the piece, patterns between the two live instruments, as well as patterns within the electronic audio, shift against each other in a way I found to be evocative of a parallax effect: an effect where the direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions. A common example of parallax is when looking out the window of a moving car, light poles move by faster than the trees behind them, which move by faster than the moon. In composing the piece, I tried to create some sonic illusions akin to this example, while also trying to tap into some of the feeling of catharsis (or perhaps nostalgia) of staring out the window at the moon as it appears to follow the car, as the rest of the world races by.

• Hyperthermic

  Hyperthermic" is based on sound material that in various ways is associated with global warming and extreme weather phenomena: wind, rain, storm, fire, flooding, heat, meltwater and deforestation. The harmonic material, and in part the formal structure of the work, is derived from the Earth’s resonance frequencies in the electromagnetic field that vary in response to global lightening activity, which in turn intensifies in response to global warming. The work is composed for a multi-channel loudspeaker setup surrounding the audience.

• I stood on the shore and looked up at the birds

  Ten years before composing "I stood on the shore and looked up at the birds", I composed my Trio, for violin, piano, and percussion (plus electronics) for Toronto’s Arraymusic Ensemble. I developed several important compositional practices during my work on that piece that I still employ today, one of which is my approach to combining electronic sounds with live performers. In my Trio, the electronics are fairly sparse, consisting entirely of a few sustained tones that support the instrumentalists and help to define the formal structure. Although electronics are often more significantly audible in many of my works, the relationship between performers and electronic sounds, which places a more significant emphasis on the acoustic sounds made by performers, has remained fairly consistent.
  
  I composed the Trio at an important transitional period in my life, right as I started my first academic position and shortly after getting married and finishing my Ph.D. For whatever reason, I found myself thinking about that time and composing the Trio while I was working on I stood on the shore and looked up at the birds, and so as a kind of homage to myself I decided to blatantly rip off the technique I first developed for the Trio of dropping in a couple of sustained sounds to help differentiate form. I stood on the shore and looked up at the birds was composed in fall/ winter 2013-14.

• Plasticine

  Plasticine explores the organic and gestural aspects as well as the semi-chaotic and generative possibilities afforded by modular synthesis, specifically the Eurorack format, in the context of electroacoustic composition. The plasticity and malleability of sound, space, and motion is a central theme to the composition. The piece focuses on the juxtaposition of abstract synthesized sounds and natural sound textures.