concepts and elaborations

Edgar Varese – Poeme Electronique

In his piece Poeme Electronique, Edgar Varese uses many harsh shrill sounds to make a composition. I think the strengths of this work are the different sounds he uses. The sonic objects take evoke a range of feelings. The shrill ones are annoying and make it so you want the noise to stop. But there are also soothing feelings and pitch bent voices in the work which add a sense of mystery. I also think the rests and areas of quiet add a lot to the work. It is much like in a painting or work of art, sometimes the negative spaces can tell as much as the positive spaces. The innovation from the work comes from these breaks. It is easy to expect a song to be one continuous gesture, but these fractures objects add interest into the work itself. The composer seems to be going for this fractured aesthetic. It seems like he wants to play off of this sense of stop and start, of hesitance and tension. Like the title suggests, this is much like a poem using commas and line breaks to create a rhythm in the poem. I he succeeds in this, because he blends many different sound together effectively, and creates a nice sense of tension in between them. While there is not really a narrative to this piece, I think it can be easily compared to a poem in the way it flows, as well as in its meter and it time.

Charles Dodge – the days are ahead

This piece by Charles Dodge uses vocal samples to create a composition. The Days Are Ahead sounds like it is being processed through a Speak-and-Spell. It flows through a phrase that sounds like it is being said by a child’s toy. I think the strengths of this work are the manipulation of the sounds. It creates an interesting pattern to follow through the song. After listening to some of Dodge’s other work though, it does not seem that innovative. It seems like he figured out how to do this one trick, and stuck with it. However, this is looking at it thought the technology of today. When Dodge was working with this, it would have been a much bigger accomplishment to be able to achieve this. As far as the traditional elements of this work, the human voice is probably the most tradition sonic element that one could use. By manipulating this, you can achieve sonic textures that are hard to get with any other instrument. Also, the message in the lyrics of the carries added weight that most instruments cannot expresses. By using language as a instrument, the composer can create a much larger experience then can be expressed with just instruments. I think the aesthetic the composer was going for in this work was that of a computer aided voice. It does not seem like he was going for an entire experience, but that he was mostly just trying to experiment with what could be done by manipulating a voice. He does this effectively, but it seems like more could have been added to make the experience whole.

I am sitting in a room – alvin lucier

This is a piece that uses a looped audio track of a human reading the same phrase over and over. As the piece progresses, more and more reverb is added to the voice in order to distort it and make it sound like it is getting further away. The strengths of this work comes from the narrative that the voice is explaining. The voice explains the process of what the song is doing, breaking the voice down into resonant frequencies and to make the voice inaudible. The work however, is slightly boring. There aren’t any changes to the voice, and it just slow degrades. I think the way the idea behind the work is innovative, although it is slightly boring. The aesthetic intention of this work seems to be almost that of a horror movie. When the work starts, the voice sounds normal and that it is in the same room as you are, but as the work progresses, it becomes more echoed and more creepy. Eventually the sound is so distorted that you cannot make out the words, but only the tones of his voice. This degradation helps to achieve the aesthetic the composer is going for. Although this piece only uses one audio sample, he achieves an interesting composition. This simplicity is very interesting, because it creates an entire work out of only one phrase.

Cricket Voice – Hildegard Westercamp

This piece uses very organic sounds that sound like they come from nature. The sample seems to be a crickets, frogs, and other nighttime insects. It is unclear if these are actual samples, or if they have been manipulated to mimic these sounds. There is also a great use of stereo imaging, making the sounds seem like they are coming from different areas through the speakers. The piece also builds, it starts out quiet and keeps adding in new sounds. This work is innovative because it combines these natural elements with some obviously created human elements. Narrative is also an innovative element of this work. There is clearly the feeling of a journey, or of going from one place to another in this work. There is a constant rhythm throughout the piece, created by what seems to be a frog croak or something similar. The composer seems to be going for a sonic representation of a swamp or some other kind of night scene. The work is very convincing and creates a very believable ambient feeling of being outside in a swamp. I think this is a very interesting way of approaching creating a piece. Trying to replicate something that is familiar to people may seem easy, but it is hard to accomplish this by manipulating other sounds to emulate these natural elements.

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