monologue

In general, while improvising electroacoustic music alongside a dancer, I have been interested in how the adjustment of a few global parameters might produce meaningful thematic changes through their low level interaction. With Monologue, I sought to accomplish this in terms of abstracting the sonic (rather than semantic) qualities of vocal material, and to do it in a way that lent itself to continuous transformations that I could play with in realtime. Drawing from a basic philosophy of Xenakis that musical sound emerges from the chaotic and may return to it, I conceived the parameter of 'width': the degree to which chaotic source material is constrained within composed parameters. Decay, speed, tone/ring (via abuse of comb filters), rhythmic entrainment, and harmonic consonance are the definable constraints of each of six voices in the piece. The raw material of each voice are half-second buffers of sound recorded in realtime from Megan's microphone whenever she produces volume above a threshold. They are played back according to a sequencer which provides a pre-composed probabilistic rhythm and a midi note target. Essentially, it is the degree to which the sound samples are fit into the sequencer that is expressed by the width parameter, as each sample is transformed according to decay, speed, tone etc, changing the effect from the raw, 'open' sound to a 'closed' target. For example, a kick drum sound might be achieved by playing a sample very slowly, with quick decay, no ring, and full entrainment; these settings are the targets, and are fully activated when the width of the voice is fully closed. Simply by specifying targets and changing the widths of each voice, in addition to calling up sequencer presets, I am able to produce the range of material heard in Monologue solely with Megan's vocals as material. The framework was realized in the Max/MSP environment; Monologue itself is a structured improvisation based on myriad experiments with the system, though one can never be satisfied that the model of interaction is fully realized, and I hope to extend these ideas with further projects.

bh