Output details

Encounters in the Republic of Heaven

‘Encounters in the Republic of Heaven’ is a large-scale composition (80 minutes, Four Acts, surround-sound) which explores and develops the musical characteristics of natural speech in order to project the music inherent in an entire speech-community. It combines portraits of individual speakers (accompanied by sounds and imaginary instruments derived from the voices themselves) with animation of the entire community of voices. In order to create this work Wishart carried out the following research tasks: (1) collecting representative recordings from across the local community and (2) developing software tools (in C and TK/Tcl, subsequently made available to others through the Composers Desktop Project) to manipulate the original recordings. Using these tools he was able to (a) extract and classify the motivic/harmonic, tempo/rhythmic and timbral qualities of the speech; (b) separate simultaneously-sounding voices; (c) extend the recorded material in novel ways (e.g. conversion of speech to song by manipulating the wave-packets within spoken vowels); and (d) animate the material in an 8-channel surround sound space.

The composition was completed and premiered at the Sage Gateshead, and Kings Place, London, in May 2011. The work has also been performed nationally (e.g. Oxford, Leicester, Liverpool, Edinburgh) and internationally (e.g. Mexico City, Den Haag, Stockholm, Aarhus, Barcelona, and Limerick) and the First Act alone has also been performed in locations including Paris, Berlin, Bergen, Köln and Freiburg. The piece is available as a recording in 5.1 super-audio on the DVD “INVENTIONEN VII: 30 jahre inventionen 1982 – 2012” from Edition RZ, and as a stereo reduction with accompanying booklet published by the composer. This portfolio submission includes both CD and DVD versions as well as the files for the full 8-channel presentation. It also includes the complete CDP/SoundLoom software: the elements created for this project are FOF extraction and Multichannel.

‘Encounters in the Republic of Heaven’ is a large-scale practice-led research project, comprising a number of distinct research components including speech collection and analysis, software development and the composition of an 80-minute surround-sound electroacoustic composition. The outcomes range from collected recordings (donated to the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English at the University of Newcastle) and performances around the world to two published recordings of the work and publicly accessible software tools.