Composition No.2

For creating my final composition I tried to blend texture and gesture. I also tried to bring features in this composition that I had not used in the other one thus making it contrasting. So as my last composition was mostly based on gestures, for this one I used textures and long sound materials. I structured it in a cyclic motion starting and ending with a gesture and having long textures in the middle, this way I think it will be balanced enough for the listeners. I hope it all goes well!

Acousmatic and experimental

Richard Hoadley’s software instruments made a big impression to me on the concert at Kettle’s Yard so I would like to post this video showing how these instruments behave: VIDEO

His piece with these instruments was very atmospheric but also exciting.

The other composer I would like to mention is Tom Hall. His composition was a blend of electric guitar sounds, computer processed sounds, music concrete sounds and poetry. It made me start thinking about future compositions. The poetry and the sound of a female voice were so efficient in this work. The merge of different sounds sources and frequencies brought about a very effective result.

looking back

The following piece was made as an exercise on the use of the High-Low-Short-Long technique. It was made using a single sound which went through transformations and processes. For more information about the ideas and processing go to my older post “High-Low-Short-Long technique”. When I played this in class I got very good feedback for it and so I decided to post it. I think part of what made it a good piece is that I was thinking about the diffusion process as I was creating it and this makes it even more suitable for using various diffusing techniques as it was “made for live diffusion”. If I was allowed to make it longer I would probably like to expand some of the sections so that the details would be more obvious. Nevertheless I used this as a beginning point for my composition no.1 and the fact that I had already worked so much on making one single sound more rich and effective helped me in my bigger pieces. I think this technique is worth exploring and practicing as it helped me learn how to develop and transform my sound materials.  Click on the link—> 1’08”

Binaural recording!

I recently attended a concert of acousmatic compositions at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Amongst the main artists were Dr. Tom Hall and Dr. Richard Hoadley both lecturers at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge Campus. Both their pieces were very interesting and gave me new ideas for my own compositions. I will talk about their compositions in a different post.

Another interesting feature of this concert was the use of binaural recording in order to capture the whole concert. This made quite an impression to me as I had never seen this before. It is a specific method of recording,placing the microphones in a special arrangement so that the sound when played back resembles the original hearing experience. For this a dummy doll is used and the microphones are put inside it and around it. The following is a video explaining the process. In order for it to work you will need to use your headphones!!

Binaural Recording

“The sounds will transport you into a visionary space, so that you will be surprised about yourself.”

I came across an interview or rather a conversation Julia Spinola had with Stockhausen and I would like to share some parts of it that have to do with speaker arrangements and also with sound material. (Conversation with Julia Spinola on 11th September 2001 in the Musikhaus for the FAZ, published on 17th September 2001.)

The first excerpt is about speaker placement in space and the organisation of sounds through space in an auditorium. Stockhausen talks about how he arranges the speakers for his piece. Notice that he says it takes his about one and a half day to complete this task.

Stockhausen: It takes me one and a half days to set up the loudspeakers and test them with several dependable people, as to how they are heard from various positions in the hall. Each loudspeaker group consists of a pair: One loudspeaker is directed along the wall, in order to reach the people on the other side. The other group points diagonally through the room. Each loudspeaker has a dispersion of at least ninety degrees, also vertically. So, for every seat, an optimal solution can be found to enable all groups to be heard. They are not all equally loud, but they can all be heard; for example in FREITAG from LICHT all twelve channels were very clear, and that is what I want. What I don’t understand is that concert halls are still being built like Greek amphitheatres with a mono-aural orientation towards the front. These rooms do not allow the sound to come from all directions, as it does in my works since 1956. For me, the directions and speeds of the sounds are just as important as the pitches and the durations. When an orchestra performs somewhere, whether it plays Verdi or Webern, it always sounds like a western orchestra: monophonic. That is obsolete. I am convinced that the modern human being is becoming a space human being. Just as he wants to travel into outer space, he also wants to perceive events the way they surround him in nature, so that also the directions and the speeds of the sounds are musically important structurally.

The second excerpt of the interview is about sound and how we perceive it, and also what he thinks about sounds and listening to music.

Spinola: So an increasing number of parameters – such as the movement of the sound in space – are integrated as elements of artistic form?

Stockhausen: Yes, that is very important. Because music is not just art to entertain, more or less classified for the various social strata. Music is a genuine art of sound vibration. And in that sense, the development of music since 1950 is really radically different from everything that existed before. One can listen with free imagination and is not obliged to visually perceive how the tones are produced, whether people bow, pluck strings, blow or beat. All of a sudden, one is free and can imagine what sounds. Before a concert, I often recommend to the listeners that they close their eyes and tell them, “the sounds will transport you into a visionary space, so that you will be surprised about yourself.” The material must – as far as possible – create its own sound world with each work, that has always been my requirement: Not by choosing from what already exists, like in pop music, where samples are always used, but by making something unique for each work. The timbres are also no longer decoration, are not just the instrumentation of given harmonic, melodic or rhythmic factors, but rather have their own structural value. In the music that has been composed since 1950, we are like physicists. We discover a completely new world in acoustics and in the art of forming acoustic vibrations: We not only invent, we are discoverers. So, in a higher sense, we belong to a musicology, thank God: in that we form our own material all the way to the individual vibrations. For fifty years, I have also been an acoustic researcher.

In this last excerpt he talks about his thoughts on how sounds should create new experience. The more uncertain we are of what the sound is doing the better as this way in Stockhausen’s words “our inner world opens up”.

Spinola: That means you are concerned with making new experiences possible in an emphatic sense,also for the listener?

Stockhausen: Yes, and with what I experience when I create music in a studio. With what confuses me and what also amazes me. I make demands on myself that I can’t even fulfil, because I have the will to grow beyond my bounds. I don’t want to accept myself the way I am. And in that sense, I believe that others want that too.

Spinola: That means for the listener of course, that he has to accept uncertainty, the “risk” of actually hearing and experiencing something that he has never experienced and never heard before. Something that could possibly upset him very much.

Stockhausen: Naturally. That is why I will always tell the audience before the coming four concerts: I have had a little spotlight installed, like a moon, for those who are afraid to be alone in the dark. But I still request that you close your eyes and remember that your very own, wonderful inner world opens up. And identifying with your eyes is not that important in music. Music is the opening of an inner world. And we are spirits, it is not necessary for us to lay our hands on it or open our eyes to check on it. The year 1953 brought such radical renewal, that we have no language to describe the sounds that have been made possible since then.

Sleepy cat-piece no1

Looking at the neighbour’s cat I noticed that he did what all cats do when they sleep lightly. They have their eyes closed but they are still aware of all the sounds that go on in the room. You can see that because they raise and move their ears upwards and on the sides systemically showing the different sound sources that they are hearing. Noticing that I came up with the structure for first piece. I wanted to create soundscapes that the listener would conceive almost half asleep, they would sometimes be very clear as to where they came from and what their source was and they would sometimes be very ambiguous and undetermined as to why they fit in. Nevertheless all the sounds I have used are sounds happening in a room, and in that respect they do fit in, they all come from the same macro-source of the room but from different micro-sources inside the room. Some have been transformed and some are very obvious some are put together and compared (for example door squeaking and cat purring) creating nice textures and gestures through their similarities of sound material; and differences as to where they actually come from. The other thing I tried to do was to have moments of silence around my gestures so that I could diffuse the piece without making the diffusion techniques obvious to the ears.

On Gesture and Texture

For a piece to be succesful some say that the composer must achieve a balance between gesture and texture. In the begining of this module I would often get confused as to what we mean by each of these terms so here’s a summary to make it clearer for you too!

-Gesture= sound event associated with motion- movement-direction (for example physical gesture) it is a  consequence of motion

-Texture= (drone) something that can continue indefinitely, or at least there is some kind of continuity, it is comprised of lots of smaller of sound events.Like the sound of falling rain.

High-Low-Short-Long Technique

In order to practice this kind of compositional technique we were required to write a one minute piece using only one sound. I used the sound of a man coughing. After transforming the cough I structured my one minute piece in such a way so that the listener would hear the transformed sounds first and these would slowly, over time, be brought back to their original source (this happened around the middle of the piece at 30’’ when the listeners would realise that what they were listening to was indeed coughing).

Then there would be some more transformation going on for the sake of balancing the sound material. The ending sounds of the piece were the same as the beginning ones thus creating a cyclic form for the piece. The reason why I chose the coughing sound is that it was very interesting for diffusion as there were moments of silence framing the sounds making it appropriate for diffusing using various techniques around the speakers.

Graphic scores

During a lesson of acousmatic composition we had a discussion about how we could create graphic scores for our pieces. Graphic scores are very helpful especially in long pieces. When talking about a graphic score for a live diffusion piece, it is not enough to present the different sounds of the piece, it is just as important to have a diagram of some sort showing the diffusion techniques and the sound movement though the speakers. This is quite difficult to represent and sometimes the best graphic scores for live diffusion are the very personal ones. That is to say that a person other than the performer and composer of the piece would not be able to understand them because they are just bare directions for diffusion which the performer has personalised so they could have some guidance through the piece. Live diffusion can be different each time, so personalised graphic scores work as reminders of techniques that “work” and that we have enjoyed but they could be dismissed if someone else was diffusing the piece. Some composers,however, are very strict about how they want their sounds moving and developing though the speakers and thus create very specific and comprehensible graphics describing the sound’s journey through a specific number of speakers.

Looking for examples of graphic scores I came across a very interesting and very explicable score of Dhomont’s “Signe Dionysos”.

Just click on the link to take a look! —-> Signe Dionysos

Listening to a Dali painting…

One of our tasks for this week was to listen to a piece and talk about it in class. Working with Richard Lo Bianco, we listened to Jonty Harrison’s “Unsound Objects”. The reason why we picked this piece was the programme notes on the CD leaflet. Jonty Harrisson was explaining Schaeffers “reduced listening” and creating an opposition to it with his very own “expanded listening”. So just by studying one piece we came across two different ways of listening!

How should we listen? Should we focus on the sounds as sounds judging them though their characteristics but not connecting them to their sources ( reduced listening) or should we expand our imagination of what the sources could be and create surrealistic relationships on sounds’ sources (expanded listening) ?
Even though both ways of listening do work, I personally quite like the expanded listening technique as it brings in moments of ambiguity and gives way to different interpretations, thus creating a different world available to our ears and imagination.
My favorite moment in the piece was around 7.33 where we seem to hear sounds of water and then they are transformed-or blended with-sounds of fire. The result is two sound sources that would never live together in the real world , coexisting in a realm created by the composer. For me it was as if i could “listen”to a Dali painting. Sounds that “fight” and cannot “live together” in realism come together in surrealism. So by using expanded listening we are able to create new realities that would keep people’s ears interested in the “plot” or “story” of  ambiguous sounds blending and coexisting though the piece.