Electro-Acoustic Composition
Aesthetic Concerns
My works for tape, as well as compositions for tape and instruments, make extensive use of recordings of acoustic instruments and acoustic sounds produced in nature. These sounds (and even musical motives) are reversed, stretched, filtered, cross-synthesized, tuned, and arranged in temporal collages and textures. This compositional aesthetic engenders in my music an organic and visceral quality, which is compelling to the listener. Because these natural sounds are easily perceived, parsed, and analyzed by the mind (unlike many synthesized non-harmonic timbres, which confuse the ear and defy classification), a musical grammar can be established acting within a continuum of recognition. This continuum is created through perceptual transformation of these sounds to unnatural variants that would be unrecognizable in another context. My compositional research here is twofold. While I want to explore new grammars within this gestalt-to-obscurity space, I seek to establish this continuum within the realm of purely synthesized or unnatural sounds as well. The challenge of these other types of pieces is to establish a sense of recognizability, in other words, to program listeners' gestalts, and then to grammatically explore the transformation continuum.