| The score for ..with the fishes.. [2015] was built in a series of tableaux: oil rigs, flood, nuclear leak, deep sea, jellyfish/methane, submerged city, trash vortex. The tableaux were joined into a long image and then a score for viola, cello and double bass was then added on another layer. The score contained several references to musical objects: a recurring ship’s bell and several passages from Debussy’s La Mer. At an early stage of development of the work the instruments were recorded separately performing the notation and also performing passages with only the visual images from the tableaux. Once all of these elements had been created and had fixed temporal positions – the position of the scrolling score and the position of the recorded performances – they could be further developed through a range of interactions. |  (above) Spectrogram of ship’s bell and b. notation of ship’s bell in the score of …with the fishes… |
 (above) The MaxMSP function object mapped to contours of the score background image to control spectral manipulation of live performers and pitchbend spectrally “frozen” (with resent~) loop of Debussy’s La Mer in …with the fishes… | The temporally fixed notation and audio allowed the process to proceed in a manner akin to manipulating audio in a DAW: processing strategies could be auditioned; data could be derived from the score and used to control audio processing, pre-processed audio could be added and so forth. At the simplest level the sound of a ship’s bell was aligned with notation derived from a spectrogram of the same ships bell and short processed passages from Roger Désormière’s classic 1950 recording of La Mer were aligned with the short quotations from the work. |
| The processing included convolution between sonifications of the score image and the performance of the same image by the musicians to produce hybrid sounds combining both machine and performer realisations of the images. The original image (a.) is compared to the spectrogram of the convolution between sonifications of the image and its performance by the musicians (b.) are shown to the left. (Right) Image of Fukishima radioactive leak and b. spectrogram of convolution of instrumental reading of the image and sonification of the image in …with the fishes… |  |
RSS Feed
