Technosonics XV Found Sound

2014-11-06 (Creation date: 2014-11-06)

Park, Joo Won, 1980-; Bellona, Jon; Tfirn, Max; Kim, Seung-Hye; DeLuca, Erik; Fang, I-Jen; Trapp, Rachek Devorah; Warren, Kristina; Stine, Eli; Maguire, Ryand

Toccata by Joo Won Park is a solo live electroacoustic piece for
found objects and the SuperCollider program. Joo Won performs
this piece by scratching, rubbing, tapping, and pushing the objects
in different ways on a board with a contact microphone. What you
hear is the sound of those objects being digitally processed. Every
time you see him clicking on a laptop, you hear different effect
combinations. In the pre-performance ritual, he mentally prepares
himself to create a wide range of sounds in a nervous and hectic
mood. The performance guide and the SuperCollider patch for
Toccata can be found at www.joowonpark.net/Toccata.pdf

smooth is piece written for the KYMA signal processing system and Wacom Tablet interface.

Limited Aggregation, by Max Tfirn and Seung-Hye Kim, is a collaborative piece for percussion and computer that explores sounds that are found by hitting different percussion instruments and modified by live processing. Each composer in the collaboration composes new material and edits each other’s material on the fly. This blends the composers’ compositional styles. Each sound from the percussion and computer interacts with every other, creating larger sounds and richer textures. There are also moments where the component sounds are zoomed in on that creates a contest between the larger built sounds and the microscopic natural sounds. These  microscopic  zoomed  sounds  are  products  of  analyzing the spectrum and taking certain characteristics of the sound and filtering out others. The changing length of the processed sounds also reinforces the small/microscopic and zoomed aspects.

Within a Sand Dune, by Erik Deluca, scored for amplified percussion quartet with one player, involved a compositional system inspired by time listening to the breath of the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. The percussion quartet transduces the sounds of the dunes, and the composer’s experience listening to them.

37720, by Rachel Trapp, is a construction of found sound shaped through a process of unfolding telematic communication. Acoustic and inductive recordings of the composers’ simultaneous transit rituals are transformed and positioned in the performance space according to the composers’ shared sensibilities, creating an audible landscape  of  movement  across  time,  space,  and  subjectivity.

Look the Other Way, by Kristina Warren: “I explore what I call “found text.” First I compiled texts from several sources, including novels, poems, and newsreels. Then I digitally recorded myself singing- speaking them, and next used various means to obscure the words (e.g., recording to and from tape, intensive layering, etc). This serves to emphasize the sonic and de-emphasize the semantic qualities of the source texts. In performance, I modulate the resulting texture by way of live, semi-semantic vocal input. All this aims to re-consider both signification and authorship.”

Touching, by Eli Stine, is an exploration of surface: surface sounds of different objects and the surface layer of musical structure. Sonic materials come exclusively from recordings of touching, leading to friction, leading to striking of surfaces and objects and their resultant resonances. The sounds of these objects meet and interact, but no interaction is more than skin deep.

Hyperions, by Paul Turowski, is software that presents an interactive context for musical improvisation.  While the performer is free to make specific choices about pitch, timing and activity level, their choices are recognized by the computer via microphone input and significantly affect the dynamic physics-based system.   Chance- based factors, including the gradual advance of destructive agents, make the piece akin to a tower defense game and allow unique visual and sonic textures to emerge with each performance.

Trans, by Ryan Maguire, is a real-time sonification of a computer transcription of a transalpine scene. The original auditory moment, amidst a herd of cows along a Swiss mountain pass awaiting an approaching thunderstorm, is transformed via machine/human listening and digital transmission. Through repeated transmutation the transience of this particular “found sound” is transpired. In general, all signals are transmodified, and transparency is only relative. The transitory can never be truly transfixed because, first, we have only its trace and, second, communication necessitates transduction wherein its substance is transmuted. Nevertheless, might transpersonal knowledge of such ephemerality facilitate transcendent experience and/or esthesic trance?

Electronic music

University of Virginia Concert Recordings

Music Library