work <- music -> teaching -> projects -> installation -> dissertation <- home |
Fountain Etude No. 3 :: 6'02" :: October 2003 This music articulates a single, very particular field of sound, manifesting a place rather than telling a story. It's a field that means to supply all the listener's needs—to be 'absorbing'; but at the same time it has (I hope) a relentless quality not usually associated with such static music. Throughout the movement, I sound a 36 Hz tone by blowing into a nearly six foot tall ceramic tube. This tone magically disappears on some playback equipment! One technical note of possible interest: the tape music (and the whole of the movement) converges on loon melodies. These are melodies extracted from recordings of loons and resynthesized in Max/MSP, using tweaked formant synthesis and an abstraction I wrote to produce perpetually evolving Chebyshev polynomial wavetables. Mark Steinberg – violin, Serena Canin – violin, Misha Amory – viola, Nina Lee – 'cello, Kojiro Umezaki – shakuhachi, Ted Coffey – 36 Hz. ceramic tube & tape |