Output details

Conduit

Multichannel tape (8-channel), premiered at Spatial Music Collective 8.4, National Concert Hall, Dublin, 17 June 2009; also presented at The SpatialMC @ SARC, Queen’s University Belfast, 11 February 2012.

“Conduit” was composed as a response to the idea of integrating two distinct currents within my field of musical interests: microtonally-based drone music and electroacoustic/acousmatic composition. As part of this process of exploration and engagement, it sought to employ processes of phase vocoding to a variety of instrumental and environmental sound samples in order to investigate how a unifying framework for these sounds might be constructed within the context of drone-based/drone-like structures in acousmatic music. The unifying framework found in this case was a metaphor of changing states of matter, explored through digital and physical processes. Time-stretching, based on phase vocoder technology, was applied to sounds with dynamic and rapidly time-varying characteristics (liquids flowing through various conduits: rivers, streams, and the pipes and radiators of a heating system). The sound transformation processes from the phase vocoder are perceived as changing the state of the liquid to a gas, with the splashes of water turning to anthropomorphic hisses as the playback rate is slowed. This digital process mirrors an accompanying physical one, as other elements of the source materials comprise recordings of steam radiators engaged in the reverse process of a transformation from gas to liquid. These transformational materials form extended gestures which are incorporated into a macrostructure organised according to this metaphor of matter states (see accompanying portfolio document). In addition, the processes offer an axis of organisation from transient (hence perceptually foregrounded) sound events to the continuous/sustained environmental-style constancy of drones. Thus, these processes have perceptual implications in terms of the spatialisation of sound: transient events tend to be perceived as more clearly-defined spatial sources; continuous/slowly-evolving textures tend towards less clearly defined enveloping spatialisation or diffusion.