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Karita oto (stereo, acousmatic)

Karita oto was premiered during the MANTIS Festival (2009) and has received approximately 14 international performance since. Significant performance include: the International Computer Music Conference Huddersfield, (2011), Ai-makaii festival, Santiago, Chile (2010), AKOUSMA festival, Montreal (2012) and the Seoul International Computer Music Festival Korea (2010). The work was pre-selected in the 2010 Foundation Destellos Competition of Electro-acoustic Composition and Visual Music.

Karita oto is an acousmatic music composition (with stereo and multi-channel versions). Its conception grew from a research project into cross-cultural borrowing and included a research field trip to Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo, Japan in 2008 where I collected sound materials considered representative of Japanese traditional music. This research visit afforded access to the musical instrument archive at Kunitachi College. The work probes the concept of ‘borrowed sound’ and how this relates to the composer’s constant search for new sound materials for acousmatic works. This composition has spurred on the continuation of my cross-cultural investigations and led me to develop the terms ‘sonic souvenir’ and ‘cultural sound emblems’, discussed in Blackburn, ‘Importing the Sonic Souvenir: Issues of Cross-cultural composition’, 2011 (Electronic Music Studies Network Conference Proceedings) www.ems-network.org/IMG/pdf_EMS11_Blackburn.pdf). This research provided key groundwork and concepts for my following AHRC Early Career Fellowship ‘Intercultural Creativity in Electroacousitc music’, 2012. Karita oto brings together concepts of cultural borrowing and compositional strategies developed from Denis Smalley’s spectromorphology. Five characteristic paths, belonging to Smalley’s theoretical writing, inform the use of space in this piece. In particular the words approach, departure, crossing, rotation and wondering informed the trajectories, placement and organization of materials, while the episodic form was inspired by the extremes Japan has to offer from the dense activity of the city, to the tranquility of the Zen meditation gardens that co-exist, side by side.