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Superfield [Mumbai] - electro accoustic composition

This composition was commissioned by Mumbai festival and Bradford Mela as a direct result of the outcomes from previous research projects with British Antarctic Survey (2003-4) and the Leverhulme Fellowship (REF 2014 submission 1). The brief was to use the sounds of the streets to capture a sense of Mumbai following the 2009 terrorist attack. This formed two main research questions: to articulate source recognisable environmental sounds into coherent musical discourse, and to develop a bespoke software environment for realtime performance capable of generating fields of abstract and intelligible sound image with a fluid motion between the two.

The composition was premiered at the National Railway Museum (16 April 2009) and has subsequently been performed at Theatre Noise Conference CSSD (April 2009), Resonance FM 104.9, London (April 2009), University of Hull (July 2011), Tempo Reale Studios, Florence (Sept 2011). Furthermore, the composition was a finalist in the 2009 Confluencias International Competition of Electroacoustic Miniatures.

The source recordings were deliberately vivid, hyper-real representations, embedding a ‘sense of place’ through a variety of bespoke acquisition solutions. An example was to wear a small pair of microphones on the ears and weave through a market place, enticing conversation from the sellers. This embedded a sense of social activity and ‘goings on’ within the recordings. These formed a library of sound accessible by an autonomous computer software environment that controlled a generative file selection process. The live performer mixes these into a continuously shifting coalescence of sound and spatiality, focusing on the multiplicity of phenomenological/auditory imagination.

This proved to be a robust solution in evoking a ‘sense of place’ using real world sounds, whilst developing coherent compositional practices, and providing the tools for further experimentation.