Note: as of January 2013, this page will only be updated intermittently (and inconsistently). Please contact me if you've any questions or requests regarding my output as a quasi-practicing non-musician.
(Click titles to play media files)
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(2012; keyboard controlled electronics)
Premiered by the Pendulum Ensemble
Sessile Blur is an experiment based on a predicate. The predicate: that different musical keys have different affects (i.e. that A minor doesn't just sound different than Bb major, but has a different 'feel'). The experiment: rather than having a piece move to different keys, can we leverage this affective quality to bring different keys to the piece?
This piece is a rarity for me in that it is performed as a relatively conventional piece of concert music. For this reason, its rhetoric is musical: the work was composed by decoupling the two hands of a Bach chorale (with some alterations), slowing the tempo significantly, and eliminating any audible attacks. Actualized through a combination of pre-recorded samples and synthesized sounds, I like to think of the result as exhibiting a kind of plant-like movement (hence the title); buffeted by tonal, temporal, rhythmic, and modular winds, certainly, but also undeniably rooted.
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(2011—Web-based installation, with William Brent)
This project has been commissioned by Open Space Artist-Run Centre as their annual 'Audiospace' project. My contribution will work along two divergent lines, each of which makes use of the strengths of Audiospace as it has developed at Open Space. In short, the project aims to (1) emphasize the role that visual processes play when working with sound (and particularly with sound software); and (2) to highlight the processual and networked quality of sound as it exists on the Internet. Rather than uploading completed works (as has been done in the past), the Audiospace interface I am proposing for 2011 will be turned into a basic sound-editing suite: artists will be able to upload new sounds, but these sounds will be available to all participants (in this, the project will become accessible to artists who do not usually use sound in their practice). What will make this project unique, though, is two features of the editing suite: firstly, contrary to virtually all contemporary software the suite will NOT feature non-destructive editing (i.e. changes made will be permanent); and secondly, individual parametric edits (i.e. reverb, volume, granulation, time-stretching, etc) will also directly effect the other artists' work. In short, every edit made by any artist will impact those made by others. Importantly, this project explores the possibilities for forming online communities through sonic 'avatars' (i.e. without textual or visual identifiers).
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| Agential Recombinant, 2010 (click image to view documentation) |
(2010—Multimedia performance-installation, with Justin Love)
A significant component of Agential Recombinant is a 30 minute presentation of Gordon Monahan’s seminal 1981 piece Piano Mechanics, performed via Skype by pianist Leslie Wyber. During the performance, the data from Wyber’s playing is extracted from the audio, analyzed, and resynthesized into the space. Throughout the installation, this process is continuously reiterated, resulting in the degradation and decay of the original sound material over the course of 24 hours, after which the next evening’s performance begins. Of note in this element of the piece is that the computational process that is utilized is an allegedly neutral one, in the sense that the process of extraction, analysis, and resynthesis should—in theory—precisely reproduce the original material. The excessive and accelerated reiteration in Agential Recombinant, however, reveals certain computational biases: moving throughout the space, the listener is able to perceive different aural spaces that result from the different versions of the ‘neutral’ process that the piece probes.
Coinciding with this 24-hour progession are numerous real-time interactive processes, some of which are more immediately perceptible than others.
Agential Recombinant is presented in conjunction with David Cecchetto’s written dissertation, and is a collaboration between David Cecchetto and Justin Love. Dr. Steve Gibson supervised the project, William Brent served as a technical consultant, and Clint Hutzulak assisted with installation.
Click here to
to download the introduction to the written dissertation.
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| Eidola, exhibition monograph (click to download) |
New work by William Brent and
Ellen Moffatt; David Cecchetto and
Ted Hiebert, co-curators. Presented at Open Space, 2009.
Click here for the director and curators' introductions to the exhibition (YouTube). Click here to hear the artists speak about their work (YouTube).
Eidola grows from discussion of disciplinary biases and their impact on interdisciplinary and new media practices. In particular, the exhibition is informed by ongoing dialogue——at Open Space and beyond——regarding approaches to sound composition, visual installation and new media arts production. Responding to direct community demand and critique——as well as the desire to foster, cultivate and nurture conflicting discursive possibilities——Eidola is an examination of interdisciplinary media practices that brings together audiences with backgrounds in music, technology, visual art, media, and interdisciplinary practice with the goal of engendering critical engagement with the intricacies of a hybrid artistic world. Moreover, Eidola assumes this hybridity as fundamental to contemporary artistic practice (even those practices that do no identify as such), an assumption that is daily evidenced in the concrete, material workings of institutions such as Open Space. Acknowledging the depth and breadth of new media practices——with many practitioners migrating from visual and audio disciplinary backgrounds——this project thus prioritizes encounter over discourse, and seeks to hold discourse accountable to the disparate disciplinary encounters that will inevitably occur.
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| KeyGen, 2008 (click image to download score) |
(16:47—Sax, Tba, Vln, Bass, and Electronic—2008)
KeyGen is an engagement with Feldman and Beckett's 'opera' Neither. In particular, the piece explores the theme of disjunction as it is raised in that piece; its various elements—visual and acoustic signs, objective and subjective materialities, static and fluid temporalities—are all co-dependent, but also co-exclusionary. In its original presentation, KeyGen existed as a performance-installation involving a sculpture/viewing room, live video, and numerous liminal spaces (acoustic, conceptual, and physical). This disjunction is also reflected in the concert piece documented here, which is itself involved in two identities. On one hand the piece documents the acoustic material of the installation, while on the other hand it simultaneously exists as a piece in its own right: the score available here was created as an interpretive aid for the performance-installation—documenting the same sounding music that was created with a different score—but now exists as an object that is generative of that music.
Click here to
to view the program notes from the original performance.
Athabasca
(4:36—orchestra and folk singer—2006)
Premiered by the Victoria Symphony.
This piece is the latest of a series of 'folk song' settings that I have been working on since 2001. In particular, I was interested in juxtaposing the text-based narrative form that is characteristic of folk music with the autopoetic form of musical modernism.
vagrant(ana)waltz(4:46—two pianos—2004)
This piece was composed by applying the 'automatic piano reduction' feature from the notation software 'Finale '98' to an original orchestral score (composed for that purpose). The culmination of months of learning to anticipate the software's interpretative 'decisions', this piece is an attempt to literalize the computer intervention that is always implicit in (now ubiquitous) notation software. Further, vagrant(ana)waltz treats this 'intervention' as a positive compositional tool, suggesting a homology between the role of digital notation software and the traditional compositional role of the piano, so that composition is in fact unthinkable without such technological 'intervention'.
Floral Print(13:40—chamber ensemble—2006)
Premiered by the Aventa Ensemble.
A 'theme and variations' with neither theme nor variation, this piece is a meditation on Hume's assertion that succession in no way implies causality. Floral Print probes this statement by presenting itself as content within the technological landscape of musical formalism. The piece includes a sculpture (pictured below) which a performer enters carrying an instrument at the beginning of the concert, and where they sit quietly and do not exit until the concert has ended.
Two excerpts from Skewed Remote Musical Performance (SRMP)
Collaboration with William Brent (two computers - 2007)
Click here to view an expanded explanation.
I (6:03)
Premiered at the San Diego Spring Festival
This piece features two remotely situated performers who collaborate in real time using custom SuperCollider software sample players. To avoid 'lag' between the two locations, the players communicate with one another by transmitting computer code (rather than streamed audio) so that if a particular sound is triggered in one location, the trigger is sent to the other. The skewing mechanism involved alters which sound file is played at the remote location, but does not alter the effect applied to the sample. It is worth noting that the skewing happens between both locations, the sound is never skewed locally, and that the local performer never knows if or how the sound is skewed remotely.
Within these parameters, the performers trace the musical form by listening to the sounding of a 'sound' that is never heard, so that the piece explores the concept of musical 'presence' in terms of radical mediation (or movement).
II - adventure in machine agency (10:12)
This piece considers the musical presence explored in I from a different angle. Here, the performer's contributions to the piece are exclusively negative: the machine generates repeating sounds that the performers remove from the mix at their discretion. In a sense, then, the performers' performance is one of 'negative sound', suggesting that the positive sound is performed by an agential machine.
Mnemosyne Space
(indeterminate length—multimedia performance installation—2004, rev. 2005, 2007)Created as part of the intermission interarts collective.
Presented in Victoria, Canada; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Puebla, Mexico.
Mnemosyne Space is an interactive performance installation that explores themes of fragmented memory. Structurally, the installation articulates two spaces: the first, a large paper box used as a space for music performance, and second, an area surrounding the box filled with numerous paper banners featuring faintly printed text taken from the Hölderlin poem Mnemosyne. Each time an audience member enters the paper box, one of the musicians exits and does not return until the audience member exits. The result is a fragmented and mobile presentation of the musical material, always crumbling apart and restructuring itself.
The Dogs, They Must Be Drowned!(5:03—guitar, harmonica, and CD—2000, rev. 2003)
This work is part of an ongoing interest in alternate presentations of electronic/electroacoustic music (see Skewed Remote Musical Performance). The simple repetition of the guitar and harmonica portion, which is played live on stage, was originally intended to frustrate the listener's automatic foregrounding of live over recorded music. However, I am still unsure how successful the piece was in this respect, as I often feel as though the repetition instead functions as a stable ground in the piece, relegating the recorded portion to a developmental or ornamental role.
The electroacoustic portion of The Dogs, They Must Be Drowned! was created using the software ProTools. All of the sounds were developed from a single five second sound sample.
(6:26 excerpt, total is 19:00 - two clarinets, two pianos, two violins, and CD - 2004)
The ensemble is divided in half in this piece, with each sub-ensemble playing a part that is identical except for being rhythmically displaced and tonally transposed by a semitone (both sections feature the whole tone scale). The recorded part was generated by a computer 'performing' the electronic version of the score through a custom sample player loaded with samples recorded from a 1970's electric organ. The same process was then repeated using software-generated sine oscillators, after which the two recordings were combined.
excerpt from Deep PocketsCollaboration with William Brent (7:42 - two computers - 2004)
Premiered at the Polestar Gallery in Seattle.
Real time structured improvisation using the open source software SuperCollider.
excerpt from Context Dictates Landscape?(indeterminate length, 3:00 excerpt—orchestra—2004)
Premiered by the Victoria Symphony.
NB: works that share the title Context Dictates Landscape? have only their title in common.
This piece is composed of a 12 second excerpt that is attached to the beginning of all of the other pieces on the program. Following the final piece on the program, the excerpt is played 10 - 30 times consecutively.
excerpt from {EventFrame.kr}Collaboration with William Brent (sound installation, 8:19 excerpt - 2004)
Prior to entering the performance-installation, audience members are asked to record their answers to a question into a microphone; they are then asked to remain in the installation space until they recognize their own voice in the sound mix. Presented as part of a larger project (made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts), {EventFrame.kr} experiments with the difference between form and duration, particularly emphasizing the audience role in enacting this difference.
Context Dictates Landscape?(8:02—voice, violin, two trombones, two saxophones, percussion, actor—2002)
NB: works that share the title Context Dictates Landscape? have only their title in common.
One of a series of works that feature the same spoken text, the saxophones, trombones, and percussion are situated in the lobby of the performance space. Entrance doors to the hall are opened and throughout the work, altering both the pitch and quality of the ensemble. The actor enters through one of these doors and speaks their part from amongst the audience. The violin and vocalist are situated on stage.
Due to microphone limitations during recording, the media file attached here does not adequately capture the sound of the piece.
(6:36—piano and CD—2003)
OutsideCollaboration with William Brent (installation - 2005)
Presented at the Collision Interarts Symposium.
To download a printable description and brief discussion of Outside, click here.
Sound (no media file available)(indeterminate length - indeterminate instrumentation - 2001)
This work, each version of which extensively features extended techniques, uses a microphone that is routed through a computer to professional quality speakers. The computer is not turned on, so that no sound is emitted from the speakers and the microphone has no sonic effect. Nonetheless, Sound is a quintessential computer-music piece, using the technology of the computer to create a piece that can only be heard with digital ears.