Waves, The
| [Genres] | Anderes |
Waves, The spielt auf den folgenden Alben
| Album | Künstler | |
 | Perspectives of New Music | |
|
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. -Virginia Woolf, The Waves (used with the permission of the Hogarth Press, London) The Waves is a work for singer and computer, based upon the first paragraph of Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name. In this opening passage, Woolf's prose changes from an objective description of dawn on the sea to a more subjective response to the scene. By the end of the paragraph Woolf's use of language suggests the movement of the sea by embodying a wavelike rhythm. In Dodge's composition, the musical patterns also exhibit wavelike forms. For example, during the first part of the work the lines of the computer part (which are themselves patterned on the pitch contours of La Barbara's reading of the text) rise and fall like waves. Dodge wrote The Waves for Joan La Barbara, who performs live to an accompaniment based upon the qualities of her own voice. All the sounds in the computer part were derived from a recording of La Barbara reading this passage from The Waves and singing examples of extended vocal techniques. The particular vocal techniques were "multiphonics" (uncharacteristically low tones that have a strong frequency component at the octave) and "reinforced harmonics" (intoning in such a way that arpeggiating among adjacent harmonics can be clearly heard above the fundamental frequency). The folk-like melodies heard near the end of the work, for example, are the actual sound of La Barbara's recorded reinforced harmonics, enhanced by computer processing. The computer part entailed no speech synthesis-a technique used in many of Dodge's other computer music works. Rather, the recorded voice is employed here as a sound source for computer extension and enhancement, and also as a model for the frequency and amplitude of computer-synthesized sounds. John Stautner of MIT's Experimental Music Studio was central to the completion of the work. Stautner's Auditory/transform analysis software was used to trick the pitch of the recorded voice and to isolate certain features of the speech. He collaborated closely with Dodge to help design the computer-synthesized and -enhanced sounds in the work. The Waves was commissioned by the MIT Experimental Studio with a grant from the Massachusetts State Arts Council. -Charles Dodge | ||