Month: July 2008

Thea Farhadian’s Digitized Viola MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Composer Thea Farhadian teamed up with viola player Katrina Wreede for Farhadian’s 2007 piece Improvisation No. 7, a song-length excerpt of which is available for download (MP3) from her website, theafarhadian.com. (That is to say, it’s an excerpt substantive enough to be listenable to on its own.)

String instruments are a popular foil to the machinations of electronic composers, perhaps because they’re capable of adequate chordal playing as to be sonically complex, yet they can still serve as a distinct solo thread in a performance. Here, Weede’s viola is heard in various contexts, at times surrounded by electronic detritus, at others reflected through some algorithmic mirror. The most ear-catching moments involve the near-simultaneity of the viola’s multi-note runs being contrasted with the digital crunch of data caught mid-process. The opening of the recording is especially fine — the electronics sound like sparks shooting from the viola while Wreede plays.

More info on Farhadian at theafarhadian.com and on Katrina Wreede, a former member of the Turtle Island String Quartet, at katrinawreede.com. (I’m not certain if she was in the Quartet at the time, but Turtle Island committed to disc some of the best digitally-accompanied string music when they performed Gary Chang’s score to the 1990 film Shock to the System.)

Remixed 78-RPM MP3s from Alan Morse Davies

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

We know what Alan Morse Davies did to construct The Last Summer. The brief liner note on the project’s home page (at archive.org) states it plainly enough: “An album of manipulated recordings from 78RPM records recorded between 1905 and 1931.” He’s taken outmoded recordings of once popular music and transformed them, courtesy of the creative license inherent in the public domain, into his own deeply felt renditions. The shortest of the three tracks, a version of the Debussy favorite “Claire de Lune,” is extended to over 17 minutes, at which point it is almost pure choral gossamer (MP3); each of the other two, “The Last Rose of Summer” (MP3) and a rousing “Ave Maria” (MP3), clock in at over 23 minutes.

It’s a testament to Davies’s approach that he doesn’t get hung up on the needle-in-the-groove clicks or dusty residue of the 78s. He doesn’t need to reproduce the rough surface texture of the original medium in order to telegraph to today’s listeners that this stuff is, plain and simple, old. His versions don’t merely extend the content of the originals until that material is ready to evaporate into thin air; they amplify both the richly melodious songs that were a dominant style of that period, and the archaic echoes inherent in that time’s sonic-reproduction technology.

Get the full set at archive.org. More on Davies at his website, at-sea.com.


Quote of the Week: R2-D2’s Descendents

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Sound designer Ben Burtt on his work on the film Wall-E:

Eve is a very high-tech robot and so, unlike the motors and squeaks and metallic sounds you’ve got with Wall-E, Eve is held together with some sort of force fields and magnetism. A great deal of her sound is purely synthesized musical type of tones that I could make in a music synthesizer and treat it various ways, because her whole character was supposed to be graceful and ethereal, so she always has an electronic noise associated with her floating around.

Read the full interview with Burtt, who was also responsible for the voice of Star Wars‘s R2-D2: moviesonline.ca.

Early Tamara Albaitis MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

How does one pronounce the given name of sound artist Tamara Albaitis? Well, the answer is buried in the audio of one of her early works, in which she recorded herself saying her name three different ways and then mixed and matched the various pronunciations (MP3). There’s the correct way — “TAM-ara” — and two common but mistaken ways: “tam-era,” “tam-ARA.” As she explains in a brief description of the track, “I also included ‘ahh’s’ and ‘no’s!’ which is normally my response to their attempts.”

Albaitis is perhaps best known for her scupltural work, which often involves speakers, such as the one pictured here, the seven-speaker “Drop” (2007), which included a four-minute soundtrack and brings to mind the spidery forms of Louise Bourgeois:

As for the earlier, auto-biographical sound work, which dates from 2002, it focuses on audio at a syllable-by-syllable level, contrasting various content, from fly-buzz syllables to recognizable words and word fragments, with small amounts of post-recording transformations, like stereo play and effects that emphasize the electronic nature of the process. More on Albaitis at her website, burnthebox.org.