Daily Archives: 2 October 2005

Lock Up Your Children

Lock Up Your Children
2005

This piece explores the controversy surrounding Buster the Bunny. In one episode of this children’s show, the cartoon rabbit goes to visit a Vermont family headed by two moms. He says hi to the moms once in an extremely brief scene. This caused a controversy as the United States government withdrew funding for the show.

This piece uses clips of the controversy being discussed on Frontline, of Bill O’Reilly and other pundits discussing the controversy, and of Fred Phelps preaching some gospel truth.

Il y a un emission pour des enfants aux Etats-Unis que s’appelle “Buster the Bunny.” Une fois, le lapin animé, Buster, est allé au Vermont et a vu une famille lesbienne avec des enfants. Il a dit «bonjour» aux mères dans une scène breve. Il y a eu une grande dispute et le gouvernement a donné une réprimande à PBS.

Ce morceaux contient des extraits des nouvelles à propos de cette dispute, la voix de Bill O’Reilly (un présentateur), et de Fred Phelps qui prêche le vérité de l’évangile.

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State of Disunion

State of Disunion
2004

The timbres of human voice, specifically, George Bush’s voice fascinate me. His inflections are almost musical. While I disagree with nearly everything he says, he says it in a beautiful manner. He is very talented and must have a fantastic elocution coach. His voice has the musical timbres of the south and the drawl of Texas. His speechwriter’s careful word choices coupled with his pan-heartland accent make him seem immediately trustworthy. I did this piece with his voice in the spring of 2004. I took his weekly radio address from right before the state of the union. Approximately half the speech was made of up lies about Iraq. The second half was lies about domestic issues. (Our economy has been turning around for so long now, it must be dizzy.) I started by playing the file straight and then slowly added a sine-tone that was phase modulated with the same file. . . . More Information

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Coulter Shock

Coulter Shock
2004

The piece starts with Anne Coulter’s unaltered quote, calling Clinton a scumbag, which is then followed with re-ordered phrases from her many media appearances. The second part of the piece takes a snapshot of the last pass of word reordering. That snapshot is broken into grains all of equal size. The play back algorithm plays back the grains in a moving window, making her stutter. On the second pass, the grains are four times smaller and the window is five times bigger. This goes on in a loop of decreasing grains and increasing window for about six minutes, until only the timbre of her speech remains audible.

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Rush to Excuse

Rush to Excuse
2004

Rush to Excuse applies granular synthesis to a 47″ sample of Rush Limbaugh’s radio oratory. There are two processes involved. The first cuts Mr. Limbaugh’s voice into hundreds of samples of equal length. These samples, or grains, are then analyzed to determine the average pitch for each. The second process cuts the same clip into unequal pieces based on silences, or pauses in speech. I mix the output of these processes together, repeating the first process several times with longer and longer grains. Content and pitch material are then juxtaposed.

In the sample used, Mr. Limbaugh excuses torture at American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and mocks the Geneva Convention. He describes a photograph of a naked prisoner being threatened with a dog, and justifies it by claiming there’s no actual assault, the prisoner is merely being frightened. As it happens, a subsequent photograph shows the actual attack. On being apprised of this later in the program, Mr. Limbaugh offered a correction and a weak apology.

I use pundits as source material for text-sound composition both to explore the sounds of the human voice and to highlight the words and meanings in political speech. It’s harrowing work sometimes, but somebody’s got to do it.

Additional offsite comments for this piece

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Scitilopolitics

Scitilopolitics
2003

I read about an acoustical phenomenon where when researchers divided up recorded speech so that each consonant and vowel sound was separated, and then played back the recorded speech with all of the parts in correct order, but with each sound reversed, listeners were unable to detect the reversal. I decided that it might be interesting to write a piece that would make people aware of this phenomenon by crossing the threshold of inaudible reversal and audible reversal. I used a short speech that George Bush gave on terrorism and destroying American culture. The speech was nominally about terrorism, but on repeated listening, it became clear that it was more about causing American culture to shift rightward, to criticize Hollywood and to push the idea of individual responsibility instead of socialized responsibility. Because of the repeating of the speech, which gradually breaks down, the friendly experiencer listens carefully, grasping at meaning. The subtext is brought to the surface in that way.

The second part of the piece uses this process but in reverse. It uses a lesbian separatist philosophy text, Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations by Jeffner Allen (Palo Alto: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1987). I picked out four phrases related to violence and terror. The ideas expressed were as radical as Bush’s but from the opposite ideological spectrum. I run the algorithm in the opposite direction, because I take the opposite view of the words. Allen also talks about violence, terrorism and victim hood, but unlike Bush, her words are ultimately empowering to her reader, giving her readers freedom instead of taking it away. Her viewpoint is equally extremist, but exists in reaction to what Bush proposes.

I found that the second movement made the piece much more bearable. Listening to George Bush talk about destroying culture for five minutes made me very tense, but the soothing voice of Jessica Feldman reading about women uprising acted as an anecdote to Bush.

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Chaos Patch

Chaos Patch
2000

A chaos patch is formed by taking three oscilators and plugging the output of one into the FM input of the next, so as to create an FM loop. Then one of the sound outputs goes to modulate a low pass filter, another a high pass filter and the last one is audio input to the filter chain. The results are unpredicatable and chaotic.

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