Created by Christopher Burns, cburns@ccrma.stanford.edu
For information, call the Music Department at (415) 723-3811.
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Going to Band Practice for tape
| Brook Eaton
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| This piece explores the evolution of both raw and generated sounds as well as the construction and deconstruction of sounds. I used a portable DAT machine to record sounds from my environment. The sounds were then processed using a variety of software and hardware tools. The final step of putting it all together was accomplished in Pro-Tools.
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| While my official concentration as an undergraduate at Brown University from 1995 to 1999 was in Electrical Engineering, I focused much attention on electives in music including the completion of a track in computer music and studio recording classes. During the fall of 1998, my senior year, I created the piece you will hear tonight. I am now a graduate student here at Stanford on my way to earning a Master's degree in Music, Science, and Technology. -Brook L. Eaton
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Interpose for guitar and computer-generated tape
| Charles Nichols
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| Interpose is a study in the interposition of gestural content on the local and structural level. Gestures 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 reconstruct the individual partials of a sound. The frequencies and amplitudes of the individual partials of an analyzed sound file 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.
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| 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.
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Palabras 1 - Todo Pasa - Palabras 2 for tape
| Damián Keller
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| Palabras . . . Palabras. . . is the longest of the eleven sections of 'touch'n'go,' a modular text and music piece (http://www.sfu.ca/~dkeller). Each section is a complete, self-contained piece, which shares material and provides sound references to the other sections. All the material for Palabras. . . was produced with ecological models implemented by D. Keller and with real-time asynchronous granular synthesis using MacPOD. MacPOD was developed by Chris Rolfe and D. Keller following Truax's POD model. MacPOD was mostly used for time-stretching and real-time gestural transformation of material. An example of this sound processing technique is provided in the voice material of 'let me see . . .' The exaggerated inflections in Yupanqui's voice were created by changing the stretch-ratio parameter at the exact beginning of consonants and vowels. Thus producing inflections such as 'muuuuuy,' meaning 'very' in Spanish, or 'profffffundo' which means 'deep'. Cultural references are not absent from Palabras. . . The most obvious and probably most meaningful one is the use of the voice of the great Argentinean poet and philosopher Atahualpa Yupanqui. Although his voice is kept recognizable, we have taken care of always processing it to heighten its presence and to give it a deeper timbral quality. Sound transformations are tightly related to the meaning of the text and its metaphoric implications. The first verses can be translated thus: "during those times such things happen that do not happen anymore." The atmosphere of story-telling set by the verses is reinforced by an outdoor background sound which frames all sound events in the first section. The word 'deep' in the verses: "if the river is wide and deep, that one who swims well gets across", is time-stretched to last approximately a minute. The same verses are used to produce a hybrid sound by means of Linear Predictive Coding. We filtered Yupanqui's voice through patterns produced by synthesized bubbles. The effect is akin to whispering inside water. Todo pasa Todo pasa makes use of two contrasting spaces - metaphorically speaking, the space of the living and the space of the dead. The first space was produced by using a recording of a big, open building space where all sound events are placed. An alternative space was realized by applying convolution to granular samples. The 'structured rain' material used in Todo pasa was generated by a three-stage process. First, several different drop sounds were produced by convolution. Then these drops were organized as constrained random meso-level events. Finally, the events were combined in a slowly evolving macro-structure which distributed the meso-events in a slightly irregular rhythmic pattern. The result is a sound that resembles wind and rain with metallic reverberations in the background. Todo pasa is a short reflexion on time. The use of similar sound material at three different structural levels brings up the question of how we organize recognizable sound events depending on their context. Similarly, the organization of these events may have a direct impact on our perception of time.
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| Damián Keller left his native Buenos Aires ten years ago. That's a long time. Some of his music was done under the hot sun of Brasilia, other was done during the wet days of Vancouver. And that's very wet. His heavy-rain piece, . . . soretes de punta, got an Emerging Composer prize. He hasn't emerged yet. But hearsay has it that he can be heard at earsay.com.
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Je est un Autre (Self is Other) for tape and video
| Seny Lee
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| Imagination, as a metaphor for the unconscious, as the significance of existence that struggles within an ego, in memory and in reality, from nil to eternity... The sounds heard in this piece are electronically processed, creating a broad palette of timbres and sonic textures. Their transformations are used to develop diverse musical layers, inviting the listener to interpret the music through his own imagination. The images presented here were chosen for their symbolic reference to internal psychological states. The animation is an abstraction of the photographs, signifying the elements of the unconscious which form wishes, desires, and symbols. A fish-tank is placed in front of the video projector. The blurry effect of rippling water delivers images which symbolize the unconscious as the foundation of all being. The concept "Je est un Autre" (Self is Other) comes from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
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| Seny Lee is studying with Jonathan Harvey and Chris Chafe at Stanford as a D.M.A student. She received her B.A. in composition from Chugye University for the Arts in Seoul, Korea and her M.M. in composition at Boston University where she studied with Lukas Foss and Richard Cornell. She has also studied with Barry Vercoe at the Media Lab, MIT. She has composed for both acoustic and electronic media, as well as for animation and film. Recently, her collaborative work "Flythrough" was performed at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center. In fall 2000, a piece from her percussion quartet "Chukwon I" will be performed by percussion ensemble `Four Plus One' in Korea. And also as a Resident Artist, she will work on her project at IRCAM in Paris.
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Sygfrydo for tape
| Juan Reyes
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| This is a Digital Media composition generated by means of Physical and Spectral Modeling. The primary subject consists of Cello figures which are subsequently processed in order to obtain their expressive qualities by analyzing the musical phrase in addition to the spectrum. The piece was composed at MOX or center for Advanced Computing at La Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. In this case, several images of a cello sound are tied together by means of a thread producing a musical suggestion. Several suggestions then create an episode, analog to the literary chapter, resulting in tensions and distensions managed in the time domain. In this composition priority was enforced in order to use the musical gesture in a tape or ``frozen moment'' context. For this purpose the notion of the ``musical drama'' was also supported. This piece was the first approach by the composer towards expression modeling.
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| Born in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1962, Juan Reyes holds degrees in Mathematics and Music Composition. Since 1989 has co-organized the International Contemporary Music Festival and periodic electroacoustic cycles in Bogota. He has been professor of art, music and research associate at La Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota for the last years. Topics of his research include physical modeling, spectral modeling, algorithmic composition and their use for expression modeling. Among his works there are ``Equus & Resonancias'', a collection of computer music works for the stage and also several compositions based upon instrumental sound subjects like Boca de Barra, for trombone, and Sygfrido for cello. In the context of sound installations his works ``pPp'' and ``Los Vientos de Los Santos Apostoles'' have been presented in museums and galleries of Colombia. His writings have appeared on several international publications and his music has been performed around the world as part of contemporary music radio broadcasts and festivals.
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Counterattack for clarinet and delay
| Ching-Wen Chao
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| 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 5 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. Many thanks to Kris Falk, Keeril Makan, Charles Nichols, and Chris Burns for helping me employ the Max/MSP program.
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| Ching-Wen Chao, born in Taiwan in 1973, is currently pursuing a DMA degree in composition in the music department at Stanford University, where she has studied with Jonathan Harvey, Chris Chafe and Jean-Claude Risset. She also studies at the CCRMA. In 1999, her "String Quartet No. 2" has won the first prize of the Young Composers Competition in the annual ACL (Asian Composers League) conference and the first prize in Music Taipei 1999 in Taiwan. Recently her "Duet for Clarinets" was performed in the Music99 new music festival in Cincinnati and "Soundstates" (for percussion and tape) at the ICMC 1999 in China.
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| ©1999 CCRMA, Stanford University. All Rights Reserved. Created by Christopher Burns, cburns@ccrma.stanford.edu
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