Inner Voices

Inner Voices

Notes

Paul Lansky's just_more_idle_chatter is a sequel to his earlier piece, Idle Chatter (Wergo 2010-50). Both pieces use the same compositional and synthetic methods, scattering thousands of synthesized speech fragments against a sustained choral background, but produce different musical results. The spirit and nonsense of the relentless chattering against the plaintive background singers, however, remains the same.

Brad Garton's Approximate Rhythms grew from his fascination with drum machines, those amazing little boxes that have managed to collapse a drum set into a small collection of silicon chips. He used the sound sampling/playback capabilities of a "general-purpose" computer to create his own version of a drum machine. The computer generated all of the rhythms using probabilities for drum hits to appear on different beats and he then mixed together patches of computer-generated rhythms to create the final piece. He writes: "Ever since the birth of my daughter, I have become increasingly concerned with the effects of our technological 'progress' on our world and on ourselves. I think that subtext can be heard pretty easily in the piece."

Andrew Milburn's Elmore is a product of hacking. It represents his hearing of a musky old piece, after several months of chopping it up, and of chopping up the software that he wrote to chop it up.

Martin Butler's Night Machines was composed in the spring of 1987 using a Yamaha DX-7 and an Ensoniq Mirage. The title is intended to reflect two contrasting aspects of the music, both due to a feeling that the 'machines' had as much to do with its creation as the composer did; In the outer sections, a frenzied, jazzy, joyous dance scene; in the middle, a more sinister, brooding menace.

Frances White's Still Life with Piano features a tape part which is made of computer-processed piano sounds, and a piano soloist who plays the source material for these sounds and various extensions of them. She attempted to create a relationship between the two parts where aspects of the same entity evolve in different dimensions. The computer acts as a kind of microscope, capable of vast distortions and expansions of time and spectrum, while the real piano quietly and persistently articulates these explorations and puts them in the perspective of its own personality. The tape part was made using Csound and Cmix software. The techniques used include phase vocoding, lpc, and filtering.

Contraption , by Alicyn Warren, for synthesized tape and drumset, reflects disparate influences, including twelve-tone techniques, science fiction film scores, late Romantic symphonic music, and especially rock and jazz. In a reversal of pop music's normal roles, the drumset soloist projects phrases of an almost melodic nature over a metrical framework provided by the tape's pitches. The tape, which was produced using Princeton's MIDI system, features sampled voice and string sounds in addition to FM synthesis and digital effects.

Wasting is a collaborative composition involving five people. Richard Kostelanetz wrote and recorded the poem which provides the sonic source for the piece. In it, a poor soul describes his weight and height for each year of his unfortunate life. Brad Garton, Paul Lansky and Andy Milburn then transformed the voice to reflect the emotional and physical characteristics of each year. Finally Steve Mackey provided the guitar sounds which are the 'excitation function' of our friend's late teen years.

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Biographies

(Note: these bios are from 1990, a lot of information is out of date.)

Paul Lansky has been working hard for twenty years trying to make intransigent computers behave musically, with some degree of success. His works have been recorded on CRI, Nonesuch, Columbia-Odyssey and Wergo records. He is Professor of Music at Princeton University.

Frances White received her undergraduate degree in composition at the University of Maryland, where she studied with Lawrence Moss. In 1987 she received her Master's degree from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., where she studied computer music and composition with Charles Dodge. She is currently working on a Ph.D in composition at Princeton University.

Andrew Milburn, a tall Texan, received his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Princeton University and is now working as a freelance digital sound artist in N.Y.C.

A graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy, Columbia University, and Princeton University, Alicyn Warren has taught composition at the University of Pittsburgh and music theory at Princeton. She is now a doctoral candidate in composition at Princeton University.

Brad Garton recently received his PhD. from Princeton University. He currently serves on the faculty of Columbia University, where he directs the Computer Music facility.

Since returning from his study at Princeton, Martin Butler has become one of the leading composers in his generation in the U.K. He has numerous awards and commissions including the 1988 Mendelssohn Award, and is now a lecturer at the University of Sussex.

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Technical notes

Contraption (1987) for drumset & tape John Ferrari, drumset (Recorded by David Gottlieb, Taplin Hall, Princeton University, 5/27/89)