Jonathan NORTON Nicholas HOPKINS Fernando LOPEZ-LEZCANO Nicky HIND Cem DURUÖZ (guitar in Ripples) Stéphane ROY Back to the Index

Celso AGUIAR All blue, I write with a blue pencil, on a blue sky Born in Palo Alto, California, Celso Aguiar grew up in Brazil in the town of Salvador, Bahia where he studied composition with Swiss-Brazilian composer, Ernst Widmer. Since then he became interested in electronic music and went on to develop a computer-controlled digital synthesizer in Brazil. He is currently a DMA candidate in Composition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics where he has been developing software tools for composition with spectral modeling, granular synthesis and sound spatialization. Celso Aguiar has written music for traditional instrumental as well as electronic media. His contact with composer Jonathan Harvey at Stanford has awakened in him a clear awareness for the spectral domain in music. Along with the skill for applying new DSP techniques, his compositional mÚtier has been evolving towards an interesting amalgam of natural sounds and their most pungent transformations. His compositions have been performed in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Recently, his work "Piece of Mind" received "Premio São Paulo" at the Ist International Electroacoustic Music Competition of São Paulo in 1995. This title was drawn from the writings of Walter Smetak (composer, instrument-builder, cellist and writer) to whose memory the piece is dedicated. The piece is about sound transformation, as a metaphor to the transformation of consciousness. Metallic percussion sounds are ever-present, while original cello sounds are broken into their rawest components. The basic cuisine for the piece was set up from these spices, and the dish is to be served hot. The cello has its identity transformed: its defining harmonic series is turned inharmonic, sounding closer to the metallic percussion. The pitches from this now bent, inharmonic series, are used as framework for a melodic-timbral game (the "blue pencil on a blue sky") played by cello and percussion. The cello transformations were obtained with SMSplus, a CLM system built on top of Xavier Serra's Spectral Modeling Synthesis and developed by the composer. "All blue" was originally composed in 1996 for four-channel tape - from which this stereo version was made. A procedure for modeling the physical properties of a room via feedback-delay-networks was employed ("Ball within a Box", developed by Italian researcher Davide Rocchesso at CCRMA, with additional enhancements by the composer). A closer impression of the original virtual space is obtained when listening to the piece with headphones.