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Vista Points (stereo, acousmatic)

Vista Points was premiered at the Centre d’arts Orford (Orford, Québec) in 2009 and was awarded First Prize in the Musica Viva Competition, Lisbon, Portugal, 2009. Further performances include: Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium, Toronto, Canada (2011), SCRIME festival, Bordeaux, France (2010) and Tweak Festival, Limerick, Ireland (2009).

Vista Points is published by Empreintes DIGITALes (IMED 12117) ‘Formes audibles’, Manuella Blackburn and also appears on the Miso Music Prize winner’s CD (MCD 023-10, 2010).

Vista Points (stereo, acousmatic composition) was conceived as an experiment into long-distance sound sourcing in collaboration with guitarist, Carlos Lopez based in Morelia, Mexico. As part of research into Denis Smalley’s descriptive vocabulary of spectromorphology, I explored the possibility of requesting sound sources from a performer purely based on descriptive words taken from Smalley's vocabulary pool, fully documented in my conference paper ‘Composing from Spectromorphological vocabulary’ delivered at the Electronic Music Studies Conference, Buenos Aires (2008) www.ems-network.org/ems09/papers/blackburn.pdf. The composition concentrated on the different effects of varying temporal distances between sonic events. Vocabulary from the ‘motion co-ordination’ and ‘motion passage’ word catergories were isolated and used to inform the work’s construction. All materials used in Vista Points are derived from electric guitar sounds. Often the electric guitar sounds are left raw and then layered with processed materials. When these sounds interact, there are points of causality, conflict and turbulence. This work fundamentally explores the effect of varying the distance between sonic events. When constructing the piece, contrasts between pressured and voluntary behaviours became a primary focus with the aim of achieving moments of activity and emptiness.