Music machines, such as the player piano, are akin to electronic music instruments in that they provide their own energy source and are able to reproduce a musical score without a human performer. Such machines are no discovery of the 20th century, yet they touch the same topics as computer-based algorithmic composition. In "Les Innumériques" I wanted to use the computer to generate an algorithmic score that would be impossible to generate otherwise: I imagined the keys of the pianos as beads, as physical objects interconnected as one large string. Keys would then react onto their neighbor's position by means of elastic links, being put into motion as a complex physical structure. Upon having created a physical model of the piano keys using the pmpd library for Pure Data, I went on to compose the piece by shaping the parameters of the dynamic system thus created.
A commission by Christine Gaigg/2nd nature for the theatre performance "Rote Sonne". "Red Death" is composed for three DJs, based on vinyl records of "take death!" (2013) by Bernhard Gander. The theatre performance is inspired by the 1970 Rudolf Thome film of the same title and was premiered in 2022 by Volkstheater Wien. Red Death - rehearsalRed Death - rehearsalRed Death - rehearsalRed Death - performance spaceRed Death - performance space
2020
Queroval "the lettuce lattice". Video
Live performance, approx. 10mins.
25. Sept. 2020 - Festival Wiener Rauschen, Aspern Seestadt
Creating digital music instruments for the performance of a certain music piece is like writing parts of the musical score into the instrument. Researchers have refered to this as composed instruments or work-specific instruments. In "the lettuce lattice" I wanted to create a digital instrument that would suffice the simple requirement of being playable without looking at my laptop's screen. Realised in SuperCollider 3 and performed under my nomicker Queroval. Performance at Wiener RauschenThe lettuce lattice label
2019
"Affair: Seven plus or minus two" a sound composition in five parts. 12mins Audio
Composed entirely from audio clips of spoken words, "Seven plus or minus two" is a journey into the
transformation of recorded sound and was commissioned by Christine Gaigg/2nd nature for the theatre performance "Affair". The spoken words, which served as the material for this piece, are text excerpts from this performance. While five parts, out of the seven originally written, made it into the final composition. its title is a hommage to the famous publication "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" by George A. Miller in 1956.
In response to the widely-discussed challenges of notating electroacoustic music, a detailed realisation score is available for the fifth part, "Code Adam". Being a descriptive score created after the composition, it permits the full reconstruction of the fifth part from the original source material using the Composer's Desktop Project (CDP) software, thus also serving as prescriptive score.
1. So badly
2. Remember your skin
3. Doppelleben
4. Unberührt
5. Code Adam Score
2019 Nov 7-9th, Tanzquartier Wien, Halle G, Museumsquartier.
2006
"links234" for four oscillators and four loudspeakers. Audio
Fixed medium or live performance, 8mins.
2012 - Forum Opus, Le Blancs-Mesnil.
2006 - Institut für Computermusik und Elektronische Medien ICEM, Folkwang Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Tanz in Essen.
2006 - Institut für Komposition und Elektroakustik, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien.
This composition draws heavily from piece of historic studio equipment, a Moog modular synthesizer hosted at Mills College in Oakland. Explore this amazing instrument, I got inspired from its sequencing module. This module permitted me to adjust the pitches of three oszillators sounding together via rotary dials and step backwards and forwards between several columns of these dials. This invited an intuitive and immediate way to find interesting chords, possibly outside equal temperament, and then switch between these chords, slowly developing a musical form and still being able to fine-tune or radically change the pitches where appropriate.
For the final composition I created a likewise four oscillator set-up in the Pure Data langauge, with a score being read in from a text file containing timed parameter values. After having worked with elaborate sound spatialization methods for a while I wanted to revert to a very simple correlation between single musical voices and single physical sound sources. The position and movements of the sound sources perceived by the audience should be exclusivly evoked by the timbral interplay of the four voices, each emerging from a seperate loudspeaker.
About six years after the piece got premiered in Vienna, I revisited links234 following an invitation to Forum Opus in France. Being interested in the divide between real-time and non real-time music making, following Jean-Claude Risset's article "Composing in real-time?" (Contemporary Music Review 18:3, 1999), I wanted to turn a fixed composition it into a composed instrument that I could play on stage. This depicted quite the opposite path of the more common instrument-turned-into-a-composition way of working. Adapting a Gametrak controller, originally intended for playing golf on a computer screen, I was able to conduct the flow of the piece with gestures of both of my hands, adjusting parameters on the fly. SpectrogramMoog synth at Mills CollegeScore excerptGametrak haptic controllerPerforming at Forum Opus in 2012Pure Data instrument
COMPOSITION
