Browse Items (868 total)

• ReCycle

  ReCycle uses my recordings of a refrigerator, a freezer, a floor furnace, ice melting, water boiling, a Jacob’s ladder I built, a faulty faucet, and noise between pieces in old 78 recordings. Some of these sounds have large cycles such as the refrigerator, freezer and floor furnace cycling on and off, but there are also cyclic patterns within their “on-times.” The Jacob’s ladder has an irregular cycle. The faulty water faucet, the penultimate sound in the piece, and the looped noise between pieces from an old recording at the very end have the most consistent rhythmic cycles. The “Re” in the title comes from both the use of the sounds of my re-frigerator, and the recycling of unused source materials from some of my previous works, including Distant Thunder, Fluid Dynamics, and System Test.

• Beyond

  Beyond the boundaries of earth to the vastness of the universe.

• Fizz

  Two sounds primarily sparked FIZZ. The first was a disequilibrium in a toilet tank that caused almost inaudible cyclic, but constantly changing, sounds: a faint rising squeak that occurred at the valve where the rod attaches, coupled with water trickling down the refill pipe, resulting in a squeak, trickle, squeak, trickle sequence. I stretched this sound using granular synthesis and layered the results. There is an ebb and flow that floats naturally across the space. It provides the long section that occurs after the rhythmic filtered faulty faucet valve that begins the piece. Disk drives turning on and off then spiral us into a section in which a malfunction in my system caused cyclic low frequency feedback. This is accompanied by fizz, a sound that I never captured satisfactorily until a student, Alison Johnson, played her wonderful recording of fizzing for me. She divulged her method of producing fizzing, providing the second spark for this piece.

• Glassy Metals

  A continuation of my fascination with the sounds of metal objects, Glassy Metals explores the sounds of tungsten filaments in burned out incandescent light bulbs, magnetic (iron oxide) tape rushing across a head stack, small ball bearings, ball chains of various sizes, sheet metal, tiny gear motors, bikes, BART (which permeates the sonic landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area), freight trains, and other metal objects.

  Some sounds are used in their raw state; others, such as the BART train, which now sounds like the wind, are transformed beyond recognition. Selecting only small portions of the spectrums of several sources and layering them results in new constructs with constantly fluctuating details. The ending exaggerates these perturbations, as sources emerge from the texture and fold back in as if they are fluttering insects hovering close by briefly, then flitting away, only to return later. Although several sources are cyclic, none are precisely so, nor are they synchronous with other sources combined in the layers, so apparent synchronous relationships occur only briefly, then drift apart. Glassy Metals takes its title from non-crystalline (amorphous) metallic materials.

• System Test (fire and ice)

  System Test (fire and ice), which primarily uses my recordings of Jacob’s ladders, ice melting, and papers sliding against each other as the sources, is a rather dramatic piece, which I attribute to the dynamic/dramatic character of the Jacob’s ladder. There is such intensity in the discharges, accompanied by wonderful sizzling, hissing, crackling sounds, and powerful low frequencies—danger is always present. The sources are convolved, stretched, granulated, equalized, and further processed many times over, then whirled into this intense piece.

  The visual component for this work uses four electroluminescent wired “imagers” in a very dark presentation space.

• Arctic Winds

  Arctic Winds transports me to the Arctic (where I’ve never been, but dream of). The piece is sparse, with occasional frantic “windstorms” stirring up the vast frozen expanse. Everything is suspended, in near silence, with occasional forays dropping low into blasts of “wind.” Each sound is crystallized, exaggerated, as in our dreams.

  The primary sound sources are dry ice and several sizes of ball bearings rolling across a variety of drumheads, attached and unattached. I started working on this piece when I had a 102 degree temperature coupled with chills for three days. I suspect that experiencing those internal extremes conjured up those beautiful arctic dreams and this somewhat playful piece.

• Apparent Horizon

  I started gathering video images for Apparent Horizon six years prior to its completion. These shots slowly reveal information in various landscapes by holding still on an image for several seconds, then zooming in or out or panning to reveal more detail, an unusual vista, rock formation, etc. It occurred to me that it also might be interesting to see what might be “revealed” from an overhead view. Since it was impractical to rent airplanes for this purpose, I incorporated NASA footage taken by the Space Shuttle and Apollo series astronauts. At times it is difficult to distinguish views of the earth from space from those taken on the earth’s surface.

  Many of the earthbound shots are of rather “alien” landscapes—those where I, as a human being, don’t really fit in—I’m the alien there. In these often desolate places the only sounds one hears are wind, insects, a scant number of birds and animals, and a rare rainstorm. I decided to take our constant human chatter and transpose it into sounds somewhat reminiscent of nature’s sounds in the landscapes to which they are attached or to transform them into somewhat “otherworldly” sounds. This was an attempt to convey an aural impression of the sensations I have experienced while in these earthbound landscapes and those sensations I imagine the astronauts might experience while viewing the earth from space. Sound sources consisted of transmissions from/through space and were from Space Shuttle and Apollo missions, satellite transmissions, and shortwave radio broadcasts. Often I chose sections that were full of static and distortion—signals that were reaching unintelligibility. There are Morse Code “crickets” at Bryce Canyon and static “rain” at the Canyonlands. This is the third work in a series of video pieces based on transformations of human-made or generated sounds, the previous two being Airwaves (realities) and Liquid Metal.

• Distant Thunder

  For me Distant Thunder conjures up images of being in the desert while watching distant thunderstorms roll across the sky, accompanied by the unforgettable sweet smell of desert rain. These storms are particularly beautiful as the rain clouds build, break apart, and re-form, sending tendrils of rain down, most evaporating long before they touch the desert floor.

  I intended to use the sounds of a resonant floor furnace and various adhesive tapes slowly unrolling as the primary sound sources, but after recording the furnace, I boiled water for tea, and could not resist recording the sonic patterns that emerged. I did use the sound of the furnace, but the tape unrolling was used only to impart spatialization through convolution to other, more stationary sources.

• Fluid Dynamics

  My original intent for Fluid Dynamics (2002) was to use two rhythmic sounds I recorded—a raucous faulty faucet in a men’s restroom near the Concert Hall and a gently squeaking gas service regulator outside of Lisser Hall, both on the Mills College campus. As the piece developed, though, the rhythmic elements were set aside as the more subtle sound of gas traveling through the pipes and the soft purring sound that the faucet made on its way to the clacking rhythm became the foci. To these sources I added the sound of a large steel ball and a small brass ball bearing being propelled across a wooden floor, a spare MCI tape machine part rolling on a linotype sheet, and very thin brass sheeting gently swaying. The other main sound is that of a large steel ball rolling down two strings of a miniature koto-like instrument.

  The sources are processed using phase vocoding, convolution, granular synthesis, equalization, and extensive layering. Although residual attachments to the original sounds remain, often their origins are rather obscured. The spatialization is natural. At times more static sources are convolved against naturally moving sources so that they take on the spatialization of the moving sources.

• Reverberance

  Reverberance is an exploration of the many timbres and textures that the Tam-Tam can produce. Through the use of a variety of implements and techniques, the performer takes us on a journey beyond our normal perception of the Tam-Tam, and with the help of Max/MSP creates a lush world full of color, warmth, and light.

  Rather than using traditional score notation, Reverberance uses notes and cues hosted directly in Max/MSP to instruct the performer which gestures to perform throughout the piece. This allows the live performer and the electronic elements to remain organically and seamlessly intertwined.

  Through the use of electronics, the reverberant qualities of the Tam-Tam have been isolated from their attacks, and augmented to show their range and depth. Decays have been impossibly extended to create rich harmonic textures and often overlooked sonorities have been moved into the spotlight. Reverberance is truly an expansion of the under-utilized characteristics of the Tam-Tam.