Author Archives: Charles

Èlègie

[play] Élégie (2006)

Cornetto and Computer / Cornet à bouquin et ordinateur

Cette pièce a un caractère mélancolique. Les notes sont instables, basculent de l’équilibre au deséquilibre, comme la vie vers la mort. C’est à la mémoire des proches qui m’ont quittés.

A piece with unstable notes. They glissando from equilibrium to precarity as life slides into death. This is a remembrance of my deceased mother and foremothers.

Recorded at CCMIX on 12 juin 2006. Played by Solène RIOT and I. / Joué par Solène RIOT et moi.

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Faux-bourdon Bleu

[play] Faux-bourdon Bleu
2006

An artifact-laden brassage where samples from french radio news are expanded and then compressed, creating a drone texture. The samples used include the France Bleu theme, the RFI news theme and some chanting from a protest.

De la synthèse granulaire avec beaucoup d’artéfacts. Il y a des enregistrements de France Bleu, RFI et une manifestation.

Performed at la Barbare, 11 Mars 2006

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Train Filter

[play] Train Filter (2005)

This piece uses GrainPIC to control filters over a sample of Broadway mid-morning traffic in NYC. Each filter is described by a cloud, which sets a resonant high pass filter and a resonant low pass filter, creating a resonant bandpass filter. The 1/q of each filter moves towards 1 as the cloud is played. The pitches of the filters move towards pitches in the Bohlen-Piece scale. The envelopes on each moment of filtering obscure the traffic sounds, so instead a train sound is evident.

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Virtual Memory (Excerpt)

[play] Virtual Memory (Excerpt)
2001

Composed in 2001 using Macintosh Virtual Memory with an AIFF header added, a Jomox AirBase drum machine and a Midiverb. This used to be a 40 minute composition, which I broke into two parts due to limitations on file size imposed by Mp3.com. I released this as an album in 2001 or 2002, but it failed to sell well. To try to get people to listen to it, I renamed the files to “unreleased britney spears,” and logged on to Napster, where I would hang around in the chat rooms encouraging people to download them. In those days, we called that sort of behavior “guerilla marketing.” Now, it’s more commonly referred to as “being an asshole.”

The first 8 minutes were always the best, so here they are.

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Pro Manko de Edzino

[play] Pro Manko de Edzino
2003

This piece was written in my first semester at Wesleyan University for a concert of short works called “Five Minute Wonders.” This recording is from that concert. The performer is Neely Bruce.

This piece was written while I was missing my (then) wife, who was studying in Paris, France while I was studying on the East Coast of the US.

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Rain Clouds

[play] Rain Clouds
2005

I’m writing a SuperCollider program based on Xenakis’ description of granular synthesis in Formalized Music. My program has a graphical interface very similar to UPIC. The working title for this program is GrainPIC. This piece is generated by a prototype of this program and is a proof-of-concept. Xenakis envisioned cloud synthesis with only sine wave grains, so the prototype only supports sine grains, however, I expect to change this shortly.

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Organic Forms

[play] Organic Forms
2005

This piece was created on the UPIC system at CCMIX in Alfortville, France. When UPIC was invented, composers using the system would typically create a drawing and then listen to it, making changes as needed. Today, composers tend to listen as they go and the drawing aspect of the system is not emphasized. In this piece, I started with a drawing, inspired by the sorts of shapes that Xenakis used for his compositions. In order to add richness, I used a triangle wave for high sounds, a sawtooth wave for low – mid range sounds and a very short period square wave for very low sounds.

This is my second UPIC compositon and it may be my last.

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