Monthly Archives: March 2008

Shorts #25: Untitled

[play] Shorts: #25 Untitled (2007)

Commissioned and (un)titled by Scott Wilson

I talked today about whether or not he wanted to give me a title, and Scott noted that the piece has a “flatuent quality,” but it would be better to resist referencing that in a title.

To make this piece, I recorded myself playing a bovine signaling horn and a didjeridu, both of which I ran through a Sherman filterbank to use as FX. There’s also a little bit of feedback, especially the very last sounds. Processing a didgeridu turns out to be much more straightforward and easy than processing a cow horn. Something to keep in mind.

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Shorts #26 Ecstatic Rivulet

[play] Shorts: #26 Ecstatic Rivulet (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Clyde Niesen

For this piece, I wanted to use a field recording that I made while camping over the summer. Visually, the campground looked like it would make a suitable set for a horror movie. The animals were correspondingly loud and screetchy at night and so I made a recording with my cell phone.

I listened to the recording a few times and it made me think of GrainPic, a project that I had intended to abandon. Everything I do with this always sounds kind of rough and unpolished, which is why I stopped working with it. But it seems to fit well with my memory of that campground.

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She’s Not There (2008)

[play] She’s Not There (2008)

I picked up my sousaphone this afternoon, with the idea that I could improve my chops and work out some angst. As I lifted it, the spit valve fell off. As I played it, several other bits rattled loose. Alas. So I put the headphone part of a usb headset around the part of the bell just above the bolts and started recording.

My voice has been changing. It’s more or less stable now, but I only have good control of it for about the bottom fifth of the main octave. After I sing some warmups, it feels tired. This process of learning to sing again in a lower pitch reminds me very much of switching from playing trumpet to tuba. Vocal cords and buzzing lips use the same physics, so it’s about the same idea. This is the first recording I’ve made of my voice since it began to change.

I found the last recording I made before it started to change and discovered I’d used the words “boys” and “girls” in a longer text. So I grabbed those two words and stretched them out a bit. It’s very very strange to me that’s no longer my voice. My voice now is the voice of a stranger. I wouldn’t recognize it in a recording.

I overdubbed some low frequencies from my MOTM synthesizer to make up for the headset’s inadequacies – it doesn’t have good frequency response in the tuba range.

The title of the piece is from a book by Jennifer Finney Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life In Two Genders. She talks about how she chose to keep her old voice. I can’t keep mine. It will never return. I feel a profound sense of loss for an attachment I never knew that I had. This is an elegy for my old voice. It was never lovely, but it was mine. No longer. It’s also an introduction to my new voice. The new instrument I’m just learning to play.

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Are You a Feminist (Part 2)

[play] Are You a Feminist (Part 2) (2007)

I started making recordings for this piece well before I made the piece, when I recorded two women in Paris answering the question “Est-que ce tu es une feministe? Pourquoi ou pourquoi pas?” (Are you a feminist? Why or why not?) Then, uncertain how to proceed with the material, I let it sit on my hard drive for over a year until Sula, one of the voices, contacted me asking if I wanted to play some music at ETC, a feminist hacker con.

Rather than do the piece entirely in French, I asked the same question in English to some of my American friends and then in German to some of the con attendees. All but one of the participants was put on the spot with the question. Part two uses the voices of Solène, Anna, and Aileen.

Some of the paramteres of this piece are controlled with a game pad.

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