Since the late 60's most of the work in composition at CCRMA has been done in a software environment which evolved from the Music V program originally developed at Bell Labs by Max Mathews and his research group. The hardware and software has improved over the decades following, and the names of things have changed. Ported to a PDP10, Music V became the Mus10 music compiler system and played scores composed in Leland Smith's SCORE language. The compiler was replaced in 1977 with dedicated synthesis hardware in the form of the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer (built by Peter Samson and known as the ``Samson Box''). The Samson Box was capable of utilizing many types of synthesis techniques such as additive synthesis, frequency modulation, digital filtering and some analysis-based synthesis methods. The PLA language, written by Bill Schottstaedt, allowed composers to specify parametric data for the Samson Box as well as for other sound processing procedures on the PDP10 mainframe (and on its eventual replacement, a Foonly F4). On April 3, 1992, the Foonly and Samson Box were officially retired. CCRMA has transitioned to a network of workstations (Intel based PCs, SGI's, and NeXTs) running Linux, Irix, and NEXTSTEP operating systems. The functionality of PLA exists now in the form of Common Music (CM) and STELLA (written in Common Lisp by Rick Taube), a software package that can write scores by listing parameters and their values, or by creating algorithms which then automatically determine any number of the parameters' values. Common Music (CM) can write scores in several different syntaxes (currently CLM, CMN, Music Kit, MIDI, CSound and Paul Lansky's real-time mixing program, RT). The scores can then be rendered on workstations using any of the target synthesis programs. For example, CLM (Common Lisp Music, written by Bill Schottstaedt) is a widely used and fast software synthesis and signal processing package that can run in real time on fast workstations.
Continuity has been maintained over the entire era. For example, scores created on the PDP10 or Samson Box have been recomputed in the Linux and NEXTSTEP computing environments, taking advantage of their increased audio precision. To summarize all these names for CCRMA's composing environment, the synthesis instrument languages have been, in chronological order, MUS10, SAMBOX, CLM/MusicKit and the composing language succession has been SCORE, PLA, Common Music/Stella. Other computers and software are also used for composition. Several composers have realized pieces which make extensive use of MIDI equipment. Readily available commercial software for manipulation of digital audio has brought renewed interest in real-time control and computer-based ``musique concrète.'' The programming environments being used for composition and developmental research include MAX, Patchwork, Smalltalk, Common Lisp, STK, C/C++, and jMax.
Since its beginning, works composed at CCRMA have been highlighted at music festivals, concerts and competitions around the world. Recently, compositions realized at CCRMA were performed at International Computer Music Conferences in Beijing, Greece, Hong Kong, and Banff; at the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music (SEAMUS) in the U.S.; at the Bourges Festival of Electroacoustic Music in France; at ISCM World Music Days; at The Warsaw Autumn Festival in Poland; at the Computers and Music Conference in Mexico City; at the Primera Muestra Internacional de Musica Electroacustica in Puerto Rico; and in concerts throughout the world. Compositions from CCRMA have also won major electroacoustic music prizes over the past few years, including the NEWCOMP contest in Massachusetts, the Irino Prize for Chamber Music in Japan, the Ars Electronica in Austria, and the Noroit Prize in France. Works composed at CCRMA have been recorded on compact disks by Mobile Fidelity, Wergo, Harmonia Mundi, Centaur, and Allegro. CCRMA is publishing with Wergo/Schott Computer Music Currents, a series of 14 CDs containing computer music by international composers. Computer Music @ CCRMA, volumes one and two, were recently released. These two volumes represent music production by twelve composers working at CCRMA during the period 1992 to 1996.
Recent compositional works realized at CCRMA include the following:
Jonathan Berger is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, 1996-1997 and recipient of the Chamber Music America Millenium Commission.
Questions and Fissures explores the fusion of divergent musical elements. The two loudspeakers present independent voices, kept separate throughout the piece, while the saxophone provides another layer, distinct from the electronic world. Each element pursues its own path of development, corresponding with the others only at the broadest levels of form. In spite of all the ways in which these materials attempt to achieve independence, we hear one piece, and not three - each layer informs and enriches our hearing of the others.
This piece is the second in a series of works which use speech sounds as both timbral material and organizing forces. The electronic component is composed entirely of heavily processed recordings of my speaking voice. While the speech never quite becomes intelligible, it animates the sound and provides rhythmic structure. In turn, the saxophone part is derived from a rhythmic transcription of the spoken text. Like the speech sounds themselves, the transcribed rhythms never appear intact. Instead, I use them as the basis for a series of variations and distortions.
Questions and Fissures is dedicated to Matthew Burtner.
Many of the sounds in Strain are barely audible, the details just beyond reach. Others are noisy, marginal, the kinds of things composers usually work to exclude from their pieces. Perhaps here they find their place.
Strain is based almost entirely upon recorded speech. I chose to camouflage and obscure this material for a number of reasons - not least because I wasn't willing to listen to recordings of my own voice over and over again while working on the piece. If the texts leave only indirect traces of their presence, they animate the music nevertheless, creating the rhythmic structures and sonorities of the composition.
Strain uses its four loudspeakers as a quartet of voices, producing a coherent sense of ensemble. An artificial space is not a goal of the piece, and there is no panning or reverberation of any kind. The loudspeakers are in no way "humanized" through this procedure, but I feel that their material presence becomes an explicit feature of the piece.
A new CD, ``Portals of Distortion: Music for Saxophones, Computers and Stones'' (Innova 526), was released in February 1999. The Wire calls it ``some of the most eerily effective electroacoustic music I've heard;'' 20th Century Music says ``There is a horror and beauty in this music that is most impressive;'' The Computer Music Journal writes ``Burtner's command of extended sounds of the saxophone is virtuostic...His sax playing blew me away;'' and the Outsight Review says "Chilling music created by an alchemy of modern technology and primitive musical sources such as stones...Inspired by the fearsome Alaskan wilderness, Burtner's creations are another example of inventive American composition.''
99% pure synthesis, Transect is another study to create ``chamber music'' using the current technology. Ingredients of lines, articulations and phrasing were created by playing the synthesizer with a synthetic player whose bow arm loosely mimics the physics of the real thing. A bowed string and a throat were combined for the instrument. A year in the mountains of Alberta and California, and the mid-life interests of the composer figure into the story line, which is like the title, a section traversing.
Violist Ben Simon wondered what it would feel like to be wired into the same computer rig that I developed for my celletto piece, Push Pull. He is the first violist to be so inclined and I took that as his consent to be subjected to further devious experimental situations, from which the first version took shape. The result is an antiphonal setting, in which his two violas (one of them electronic) are paired with musical settings from the electronics. The overall setup is a sort of solo version of Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, a duo of quartets in which an acoustic group trades-off with an electronic one.
The positions of the two violas are tracked by infrared to give the soloist control over events generated on-the-fly by the computer. In creating these materials, I wanted to establish a feeling of vorticity and the approach to vorticity. Hence the name, which incidentally refers to the first real-time digital computer (from the 40's).
A second version for saxophone solo has been played by Maria Luzardo (Arg.) and Katrina Suwalewski (Den.). Its setup and form is closely related to the earlier version.
For celletto and live electronics. Performed in France, Germany, Argentina, China, U.S. The celletto is the cellist's answer to all the fun keyboard players have been having lately with live computer synthesis. Push Pull is a setting for an "augmented player" where the computer almost becomes a part of the performer. Instrumental gestures are amplified musically and launch off into a life of their own. The soloist sows some of the seeds of what happens and can enter into dialogue with the musical textures that evolve. The work is a study for a new piece for singer and computer sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The software system for PushPull has been applied in two small ensemble settings, both partly improvisational.
With Fred Malouf for electric guitar, tenor saxophone, celletto and computers. Premiered ICMC Thessaloniki, Greece, 27 Sep 1997. Also performed in Germany (1998) and U.S. (1999).
Chris Chafe is an awardee of National Endowment for the Arts Composer's Fellowship 1982-1983, 1994-95; Green Faculty Fellowship 1995-96; Resident Artist, Banff Centre, 1998-99.
String Quartet No. 2, inspired by the relationship between soloists and accompaniment in Chinese Opera, explores the idea of two contrasting gestures: a long-sustained note against short, "shattered" figures. The long note is held almost throughout the piece while these shattering sounds try to break up the texture. Additionally, a great deal of "sul ponticello" and harmonics are employed to simulate the high-frequency, nasal singing of the soloists.
The pitch A provides a focal point to the piece. It presents itself both in long, sustained gestures and it also forms the background of the harmonic workings of the piece.
In 1999, String Quartet No. 2 won the first prize of the Young Composer Competition in the annual ACL (Asian Composer League) conference, and the first prize in Music Taipei 1999, the most prestigious composition competition in Taiwan.
To compose a series of studies for 2 pianos has been in my compositional plans for some time. The idea is to employ the serial manipulation of pitch, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, new piano techniques, etc., to achieve less predictable results.
Study I explores the idea of two contrasting entities: long and loud notes (foreground) against short and soft ones (background). Midway through the piece, the 2 roles seem to exchange. (The 54-note series overwhelms the piece pitchwise, and a series of prime numbers, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13, decides the number of rapid notes for the succession of each phrase.)
Study II presents accented notes in extremely fast ascending scales between the 2 pianos and a slow descent.
Study III, while the third in this series, also belongs to a series of pieces dedicated to the memory of my father. As in all these dedicatory compositions, the pitches G# and C (his initials) are highlighted.
Soundstates presents and explores the 3 states of matter (gas, liquid and solid) and their transformations into one another. This flowing from one sound state to the other forms the basis of the structure of the piece, to reflect a similar process in the spontaneous changes in nature. The piece begins with solid, block-like sounds which gradually disintegrate; it ends with a succession of rising, more atmospheric sounds, with a return to elements of the original material. The coda carries residual traces of preceding elements. The source sounds were mostly drawn from the marimba, played by Randal Leistikow. They were digitally processed in the CLM (Common Lisp Music) environment. Many thanks to Juan Pampin who helped me in employing CLM equipment, and to Randal's performance.
Soundstates was premiered at CCRMA in Fall 1998 and was recently performed at the International Computer Music Conference, October 1999.
Delay lines, as ``counterattack'', begin by echoing only the strong notes played by the clarinet (processed through an amplitude follower) but gradually take over the performance from the clarinet during the course of five stages. The delay lines utilize various controls of delay time, feedback amount, detectable values, and pitch shifts. the clarinet sound is processed in real-time in the Max/MSP environment.
A concerto for Zeta electric/MIDI violin and symphonic band
Carl Sagan challenged and inspired a generation to consider a universe not made for us, to look beyond our planet, and at the same time to recognize its fragility and preciousness. He played a leading role in space exploration, planetary science, the study of the origins of life and the hunt for radio signals from extra-terrestrial civilizations. I attended a series of lectures by Sagan at Cornell University in the early 70s and have been a fan ever since. In Other Worlds, I have tried to paint in sound a vista such as might be seen by the shores of the nitrogen lakes of Triton, freshly covered with methane snow and irradiated into the material of life.
Other Worlds was commissiond by the 1998 International Computer Music Conference and the University of Michigan, and premiered at the conference. Andrew Jennings was the violin soloist, H. Robert Reynolds was the conductor of the University of Michigan symphonic band. The piece was also presented at the 1999 SEAMUS conference in San Jose.
BIOGRAPHY: David A. Jaffe received a National Endowment for the Arts Collaborative Fellowship in 1993-1994, an NEA Composer Fellowship in 1989 and an NEA Composer Fellowship in 1982. He was the NEA Composer-In-Residence with Chanticleer 1991. In 1998, his Other Worlds was commissioned and premiered at the International Computer Music Conference in Ann Arbor. Other 1997-1998 premieres include Quiet Places for string quartet, presented on the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Music series at Davies Hall, Havana Dreams for chamber ensemble, presented by Earplay at Yerba Buena Forum, and The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, presented at Yerba Buena Theatre.
Christopher Wendell Jones
The title of this piece reflects its structural nature. Matragn is an anagram of the word ``Tangram,'' a Chinese puzzle. The puzzle is solved by arranging seven simple shapes in a multitude of configurations to create new, more complex forms. Like the puzzle, Matragn consists of simple elements which are perpetually reordered and reinvented.
Matragn was written for clarinetist/composer/improviser Matt Ingalls, whose improvisations provided the sonic core for the electronic part. Special thanks also to Chris Burns and Juan Pampin for their technical advice and support.
touch'n'go / toco y me voy is a modular text and music work. Each section is a complete, self-contained piece which shares material and sound references with the other sections. The piece is published as an enhanced CD by earsay productions http://www.earsay.com. The CD includes sounds, text, and the algorithms used to create the piece. The text, in HTML format, is available at http://www.sfu.ca/~dkeller.
Sections of touch'n'go have been played in Vancouver, Bourges, Stanford, and on Zagreb Radio.
Eum-Yang is a composition for Disklavier, sampled and computer-modified violin sounds, and Celleto. The Disklavier and violin sounds are controlled by Radio-Baton through the PadMaster program using a NeXT computer. Two digital mixing processors (DMP-11) are also linked to the Radio-Baton to control the quadraphonic sound system.
Eum-Yang, in chinese pronunciation Yin-Yang, is an old oriental philosophy. ``Eum'' means dark and cold, while ``Yang'' means bright and hot. In music, these constrasts and polarity can be expressed in many ways: Color of harmony (dark and bright), Level of pitches (low and high), Level of loudness (soft and loud), and speed of rhythm (fast and slow).
The symbol of Eum-Yang, called Taeguk, is divided into two Yee (Divine Gender), which are in turn divided into four Sang (Divine Phase). The four Sang are divided into eight Kweh (Divine Diagram). Each of these eight Kewh has a meaningful names which are four polaric pairs: Sky and Earth, Pond and Mountain, Fire and Water, and Thunder and Wind. The piece contains twelve sections which are eight sections of each of above and four sections of each of those four pairs, which is a kind of recapitulation.
Je est un Autre is a journey of imagination and an aesthetic evolution of its ingredients. The total work will consist of four 5-10 minute pieces; combining electro-acoustic music, and visual images in the first piece, and performance elements in the second piece. The third piece will consist of only acoustic instruments, a sextet, and the fourth piece will be performed with a ceramics exhibition in a gallery in Rome, Italy.
In these pieces, Imagination, as a metaphor for the unconscious, signifies the existence which struggles within an ego, in memory and in reality, from nil to eternity.
The raw acoustic material will be recordings of the sound of running water, shaking rice, and insects. The sounds will be electronically processed, creating a broad palette of timbres and sonic textures. These transformations will be used to develop diverse musical layers, inviting the listener to interpret the music through his own imagination.
The imagery for the piece will include animation and photographs. The images were chosen for their symbolic reference to internal psychological states. The animation will be an abstraction of the photographs, signifying the elements of the unconscious which form wishes, desires, and symbols.
In Je est un Autre I, a fish tank will be placed in front of the video projector. The shadow effect of rippling water delivers images which refer to the unconscious as the foundation of all being.
In addition to images and sound, Je est un Autre II will incorporate a performance artist. This piece will continue to explore concepts presented in Je est un Autre I with the performer personifying specific facets of the unconscious. The actions of the performer will illuminate three phases of the unconscious: the Real (need), the Imaginary (demand), and the Symbolic (desire) using a plastic installation.
Premieres:
iICEsCcRrEeAaMm is a beta, er.. I mean alpha version of a new multichannel tape piece I'm still working on. As in the software world, Marketing informs me that in future versions bugs will be squashed and new features will be added for the benefit of all listeners. iscream refers to the origin of most of the concrete sound materials used in the piece. Screams and various other utterances from all of Chris Chafe's kids were digitally recorded in all their chilling and quite upsetting beauty. They were latter digitally fed into the "grani" sample grinder, a granular synthesis instrument developed by the composer. ICECREAM refers to the reward the kids (and myself) got after the screaming studio session. The piece was composed in the digital domain using Bill Schottstaedt's Common Lisp Music. Many software instruments and quite a few other samples of real world sounds made their way into the bitstream.
"...come, travel with me through the House of Mirrors, the one outside me and the one within. Run, fly, never stop ... never think about being lost in the maze of illusions, or you will be. Glide with me through rooms, doors and corridors, surfing on tides of time, looking for that universe left behind an eternity ago. Listen to the distorted steps, the shimmering vibrations that reflect in the darkness, watch out for the rooms with clocks where time withers and stops ..." fll.
House of Mirrors is an improvisational tour through a musical form and a four channel sound environment created by the composer/performer Fernando Lopez-Lezcano. The sound of doors opening and closing define the transitions between rooms, corridors and open spaces, where soundfile playback and midi controlled synthesis mix to create different atmospheres sharing a common thread of pitches, intensities and timbres. The journey through the House of Mirrors is controlled in real time through an interactive improvisation software package - PadMaster - developed by the composer over the past three years. The Mathews/Boie Radio Drum is the three dimensional controller that conveys the performer's gestures to PadMaster. The surface of the Radio Drum is split by PadMaster into virtual pads, each one individually programmable to react to baton hits and gestures, each one a small part of the musical puzzle that unravels through the performance. Hits can play soundfiles, notes, phrases or can create or destroy musical performers. Each active pad is always "listening" to the position of the batons in 3D space and translating the movements (if programmed to do so) into MIDI continuous control messages that are merged with the stream of notes being played. The virtual pads are arranged in sets or scenes that represent sections of the piece. As it unfolds, the behavior of the surface is constantly redefined by the performer as he moves through the predefined scenes. The performance of House of Mirrors oscillates between the rigid world of determinism as represented by the scores or soundfiles contained in each pad, and the freedom of improvisation the performer/composer has in arranging those tiles of music in time and space.
Charles Nichols
Interpose is a study in the interposition of gestural content on the local and structural level. Materials are introduced on their own and then incorporated into the overall texture, or taken from the texture and elaborated upon within their own sections.
The pitch content is taken from rotations and transpositions of a row built from trichords and tetrachords, which themselves are the basis for the harmonic motion of the piece. The row also serves as a skeletal pitch structure for the piece, providing the pitch levels for each section.
The tape part serves as a timbral extension of the guitar part, as if the resonance of the guitar is being transformed. The timbres of the tape part were created with instruments written in Common Lisp Music which use a hybrid approach to additive synthesis.
Building on the long tradition of additive synthesis, various conventional synthesis techniques are used to resynthesize the individual partials of an analyzed sound, which are added to produce the resynthesized sound. The frequencies and amplitudes of the individual partials of an analyzed sound are converted to percentages of the fundamental frequency. Then the frequencies and amplitudes of various types of unit generators are set to these values and added to create a spectrum related to the original sound source, but exhibiting the distinct characteristics of the chosen synthesis technique. In addition to sine wave resynthesis, frequency modulation, formant filtered pulse train subtractive synthesis, and Karplus-Strong plucked string physical modeling instruments are used to generate each partial of the resynthesized sound, producing a pure steady-state, spread, scattered, and plucked timbre, respectively. Furthermore, the frequency, amplitude, panning, distance, and reverb of each synthesis instrument are controlled by two envelopes: one which dictates the global behavior for each musical parameter and another which determines the scaling of the global behavior over the range of partials, providing global control over the musical behavior for each partial of the resynthesized sound.
Performances:
Regulate Six is a study in granular synthesis. Samples were taken from recordings of male and female voices singing a line from a children's book, and were reassembled using Bill Schottstaedt's Common Lisp Music to create a new waveform whose spectrum is based on the selected vowel or consonant content of each word. Within the computer-generated sound files, pitches are grouped according to timbral types and sweep across or converge at points along the stereo field. The MIDI violin triggers an array of samples, which are similar in timbre to the background material, performing real-time granulation on the samples through the use of trills and tremolos. The violin's MIDI pitch is often harmonized through MAX programming, which is controlled by a foot pedal. The pedal also triggers the start of each sound file.
As an undergraduate violin major, Charles Nichols studied composition with Samuel Adler and Warren Benson, at the Eastman School of Music. After receiving his Bachelor of Music degree, he attended Yale University, where he studied composition with Martin Bresnick, Jacob Druckman, and Lukas Foss, and computer music with Jonathan Berger. Interested in composing and performing interactive computer music, and researching digital synthesis and musical instrument design, he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where he has studied composition with Richard Felciano, Jonathan Harvey, and Jean-Claude Risset, and computer music with Chris Chafe.
The pleasure of space: This cannot be put into
words, it is unspoken. Approximately: it is a form of
experience -the "presence of absence"; exhilarating
differences between the plane and the cavern, between
the street and your living-room; the symmetries and
dissymmetries emphasizing the spatial properties of my
body: right and left, up and down. Taken to its extreme,
the pleasure of space leans toward the poetics of the unconscious, to the edge of madness.
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction
On Space reflects on the texts and ideas of a painter, a writer and an architect that shaped Art over the last century.
In his transcendental book "On the Spiritual in Art" (1910), Wassily Kandinsky wrote:
Kandinsky's ideas, especially those of space and expression, made their way into the piece, embodied as sound trajectories in space that behave as points and lines to plane.
Related to the form of the piece is a text by Borges: La muerte y la brjula (1942). Along the pages of this fascinating story, a detective (Erik Lnnrot, ``an Auguste Dupin'' of detectives) finds his own destiny within an infinite labyrinth that is his own city. A series of mysterious deaths equidistant in time and space are the clues that help him find his own death at Triste-le-Roy (south of a mythical Buenos Aires). The music of On Space is deployed in different spaces that are all perspectives of the same urban landscape from the four cardinal points (North, West, East, South). As in the text, the same things are replicated ad infinitum, and the idea that we only need three points to find a fourth becomes obsessive.
Years before designing the folies for La Villette in Paris, Bernard Tschumi wrote in his essay Questions of Space (1974):
In On Space, percussion and electronics are combined to sculpt sound in space, somehow trying to answer these questions in terms of sound poetry. The program for the piece was developed as a dynamic urban design where each section is constructed to show a virtual perspective from different vanishing points.
On Space closes a cycle of pieces that explores the materiality of percussion sound: metal (Metal Hurlant, 1996), wood (Toco Madera, 1997), and skins (Skin Heads, 1998). On Space uses the sound materials created in all these works to shape space as a continuous matter, capable of inflexions and changes.
This piece has been comissioned by ``Les Percussions de Strasbourg'' and GRAME for the openning of the ``Musiques en Scene'' festival 2000 in Lyon, France.
Skin Heads is for percussion trio and computer generated sounds. Skin heads are flat, usually covering an empty space, just a volume of air. Any resemblance with those that you might cross in the streets of Berlin is mere coincidence. Skin heads resonate, becoming the living body of other instruments, altering their sound or even magnifying their presence. Skin Heads, for percussion skins trio and electronics, is based on these resonances (skin percussion instruments), explored and transformed both by electronic and acoustic means. Skin Heads is the third piece of a cycle written for each family of percussion instruments and electronics. The first two works of the cycle are Metal Hurlant (1996), for metallic percussion (solo), and Toco Madera (1997) for wooden percussion (two players), both premiered at Stanford. This cycle will be completed with a percussion quartet combining all the instrumental palette.
Technical note: The spectral analysis and transformations of the sampled percussion instruments were done using ATS, spectral modeling software progrmmed by me in Lisp. All the digital sound processing and synthesis for the piece was performed with Common Lisp Music, developed at CCRMA by Bill Schottstaedt.
North of San Francisco, near Point Arena, the sea transforms the beach into a beautiful, constantly evolving mile long sculpture. On the beach hundreds of wood logs are washed onto the coast by the Pacific Ocean. I discovered this sculpture (or is it an installation?) while beginning work on Toco Madera. The dense textures created by drift wood of all sizes inspired the form and process of the piece. I realized that my compositional work had to be similar to the role of the sea, which not only placed the objects in textural combinations, but transformed their surfaces and matter to create new complex morphologies.
I sculpted new sounds with the computer from a set of nine wooden percussion instruments recorded in the studio. I wanted to keep the rustic quality of wood sounds, to operate on them respecting their soul. This task was achieved using spectral analysis of the instrumental sounds to extrapolate their salient acoustic qualities, and digital filters to carve their matter. Throughout the piece, these transfigured wood sounds interact with the original instrumental set, performed by two percussion players, to create a multilayered musical space that reflects the textural traits of the natural wooden sculpture.
Toco Madera is the second of a cycle of percussion works exploring what philosopher Valentin Ferdinan calls ``materiality'' of sound. For this work (as for Metal Hurlant, the first piece of this cycle) a qualitative logic that guided the compositional process was inferred from the acoustic structure of the material used. In Toco Madera music becomes the expression of wood.
The analysis and spectral transformations of the instruments were done using ATS. All the digital signal processing for the piece was performed with Bill Schottstaedt's Common Lisp Music.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Juan Pampin has studied composition with Oscar Edelstein and Francisco Kropfl. He holds a Master in Computer Music from the Conservatoire Nationale Superieur de Musique de Lyon, where he studied with Denis Lorrain and Philippe Manoury. As a Visiting Composer at CCRMA in 1994, he composed the tape piece "Apocalypse was postponed due to lack of interest" that received an award in the Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges 1995. He has been composer in residence at the LIEM-CDMC studio in Madrid, and guest lecturer at Quilmes National University in Argentina.
Metal Hurlant has been composed for a percussion player (playing metallic instruments) and computer generated sounds. The hybridity of the piece serves a qualitative logic. Atonal music during the '20s and serialism later stressed what Adorno referred to as the inner logic of procedures. In contrast, this work follows the logic of the sound materials, not the logic of the procedures, to shape acoustic matter. The acoustic material comes from a studio recording of metallic percussion instruments. Spectral analysis of these sounds provides the raw matter for the composition. This data is a digital representation of the qualitative traits of metallic percussion. It defines the range of acoustic properties available for manipulation and determines the further behavior of qualitative traits in the overall composition. In this way, qualitative parameters supply compositional parameters.
Spectral analysis was used to explore what can be called the sound "metalness" of the selected instruments. Since the range of compositional operations is provided by the isolated sound metalness, to certain extent the qualitative structure of the material takes command over the compositional process. Moreover, the metalness ruling the computer generated sounds furnishes the morphological boundaries of theinstrumental part. Metal Hurlant is an expression of metalness sculpted on percussion and electronic sounds.
The electronic sounds for this piece were generated with Bill Schottstaedt's CLM using my ATS library for spectral analysis, transformation and resynthesis (see research activities).
Premiered May 24, 1999 in Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium, this piece demonstrates the use of my sonification research as applied to algorithmic composition.
Kotoka Suzuki
Yoei is a Japanese word, which describes a sound that rings and flutters in the air, resonating in one's ear long after it has been heard. This piece exploits many different acoustic movements to create this effect, with six percussionists and the electronic sound, surrounding the audience in order to complete the spatial environment. The primary goal of this piece, however, is not merely to create sounds, but to combine the world of the visual with that of sound. I have stretched the role of the dancer from merely visual, to both acoustic and visual - creating a live instrumental performer - a dancer who triggers and controls the electronic sounds in real-time using the five electric sensors that are attached to his/her body. All the computer generated sound sources derive from the sounds of the percussion instruments used in this piece, and similarly, the percussion often imitates the sound of the computer-generated sounds of the CD and the dancer. The percussion sounds were manipulated and recorded for the music of the CD and the dance using sound editing programs such as Sound Editor and CLM.
Kotoka Suzuki received a B.M. degree in composition from Indiana University in 1994 and a D.M.A. degree in composition at Stanford University in 1999 where she studied with Jonathan Harvey and David Soley. She has also been a fellow composer at several festivals including, Domain de Forget, June in Buffalo, Voix Nouvelles Royaumont, and Darmstadt, where she studied with York Hller, Walter Zimmermann, Brian Ferneyhough, and Franco Donatoni. As an active composer, many of my works have been awarded, commissioned and performed in major venues across the globe, including radio and television broadcasts in U.S. and Canada. Last year, she was selected to be a Resident Artist at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California and received the Gerald Oshita Fellowship. Most recently, her work for a sextet Distortion was broadcasted by the CBC radio station nationwide, and is currently being performed on a Canada Concert Tour by Continuum for their 1999-2000 concert season. She has composed for both acoustic and electronic means, as well as for dance and films, and her latest work Yoei for six percussionists, CD, and a dancer with real-time sensors, was premiered at Stanford in July 1999 with a highlight on ZDTV station (cable television dedicated to computers and technology). She is currently working on her new project for CD and video installation, which will be premiered at CNMAT (center for new music and audio technology) in Berkeley this year.
Outside the Box premiered at the ``Made in Canada Festival'' in Toronto Canada, performed by New Music Concerts, under Robert Aitken. This work for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello, was commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, and was broadcast live on the CBC radio show ``Two New Hours''.
Borderline for cello and tape, premiered April 15th, 1998 at the East Cultural Center in Vancouver, Canada. Commissioned and performed by the Canadian cellist, Shauna Rolston, Borderline features a lyrical style in the cello contrasted by a diverse electronic tape part, constructed using various analog modelling synthesis programs.
Slipping Image for mixed quartet and tape was performed at the 1998 ICMA conference in Ann Arbor Michigan. It was also chosen to be on the 1998 ICMC Compact Disc.
Sean Varah is currently working on a commission from the CBC for a piece for flute and tape for the Canadian flautist, Robert Cram to be premiered in April, 1999.
Realaudio recoridngs of all these works are available at http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/~cello/.
Marek Zoffaj
In Principio Erat Verbum (In the Beginning Was the Word), for tape, is an introduction to a work in progress. Its individual parts are based on several statements from the New Testament. The first three sentences from Evangelium by John were used as the initial text and source of inspiration for this introductory movement. The piece is a reflection upon the dialectic relation between concrete (knowledge, experience) and abstract (intuition) meanings of spoken words and their origin, which is also joined with the sacral roots of human beings. The form of this piece reflects the cirlce model of creation of the World that is hidden in the initial text of St John Evengelium. The composition evolved from material which was collected last year at CCRMA. The principal rhythmic structures, as well as some of the individual samples, were recorded using the Korg Wavedrum instrument and a grand piano. All this material was later pro cessed through Bill Schottstaedt's CLM, Paul Lansky's RT, and ProTools.
Marek Zoffaj is a vising scholar at CCRMA, Stanford University, as an awardee of the Fulbright Foundation. He has been also finishing his Master in Music at Academy of Drama and Music in Bratislava.
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