Output details

...ne l'aura che trema

Concert work for alto flute and live electronics

This piece sets out to discover the extent to which the criteria for maximal liveness outlined in my article ‘Theses on Liveness’ (Organised Sound, 12(1): 59–66) – that the response should be immediate, entirely live (no sound files), consistent, and learnable like an instrument (and so not changing during the piece, therefore without score following) – be practically realised in a musical work. The aim is for the performer to learn and play the instrument flute-plus-electronics in a way that extends some of the fine-grainedness of expression familiar to a musician in relation to the instrument alone. Thus, all processing is immediate and responsive to the live sound. As can be seen in the schema at the beginning of the score, there is a network of processes responding in non-linear ways to the tracking of pitch, envelope, and spectral flatness (roughly equivalent to “breathiness” of the flute sound). Thus, for instance, a sound that is both breathy and loud will be reinforced with granular octaves; a sound that pure and of a certain pitch will cause all the treatment to be “sieved” through a harmonic series filterbank; very soft sounds, including the opening multiphonics, have a spectral “peak compression” applied, so that the weak inharmonic components of the sound are boosted, revealing the complex harmonic interior of these sounds. In this way, a highly variable, yet learnable and responsive, meta-instrument is constructed, so that in different parts of the piece the response is highly distinctive, without the need for score following. Thus, it is hoped that not only the performer but the audience will be able to make sense of the relationship, so that the potential disembodiment of live electronics is minimised, and the direct expressive potential revealed.