ELECTRONIC MUSIC STUDIO WORKS PROGRAM NOTES

2000-2001 Academic Year

CHRISTOPHER CHEADLE : MORNING SUBURBIA. Not available.

ERIK JOHANSEN : DRIVE BY. Drive By was written using one patch. This patch was created by editing the waveform of a preexisting patch so that it mimicks the sound of a car driving by. The sound was recorded for about 3.5 minutes in duration and pans and volume changes were automated. Changes in the sound were created through real-time wave editing, and the resulting track was then run through a flange effect.

JUSTIN PATTERSON : INANIMATE COMPROMISE. This work was composed using a Macintosh computer and sequencer. An electric guitar run through a Line 6 Pod Pro was used as the sound source. The sound of the guitar was used because of its analog properties and the natural variation of tone inherent in those analog properties. The guitar was used in an unorthodox manner that attempts to defy the traditional sound of electric guitar music.

CHRISTOPHER CHEADLE : DOLL HOUSE. Doll House is an attempt at creating a soundscape using samples, digital signal processing, noise, and sequencing. The form of the piece is created by the reiteration of a pulsing block of sound. Doll House was inspired by certain excerpts from the music of Meat Beat Manifesto and other experimental, electronic groups.

MATTHEW CURETON : A ROOM WITHOUT A DOOR. A Room Without a Door begins with a single idea which I sprung off of to create this piece. In reference to the title, I feel this piece tries to take you somewhere, but you are never able to leave behind the original impression or "room."

NICOLE CARROLL : THE HOLLOW MEN. This piece is based on the poem The Hollow Men, by T.S. Eliot. All sounds in the piece are derived from the recitation of the poem, performed by Mr. Ed Owen. The form closely follows that of the poem until the end of movement IV, where phrases from previous movements are reiterated before proceeding to the final movement. The piece focuses on the repetitive sounds of the text. The most prevalent sounds of each stanza are reinforced with the underlying sounds, which are mutations of the text. To create this piece, I used a DAT recorder, a Mac G3, the Micrologic audio sequencer program, the Peak audio editor program, and human voice. I would like to thank Mr. Owen very much for being my voice. [over for text]

NICOLE CARROLL : NIGHT LIGHTS. Night Lights is a short study piece. Its intent was to prepare me for working with longer, more complex video footage. I focused on articulating the lighter shades against the darker background with crystalline sounds against more subdued, darker tones. The movement and growth of the grays, the night lights, is the most important element to the work. The movement of the light was ever changing, so I complimented this by retaining similar gestures, but altering the high tones.

NICOLE CARROLL : FROZEN SEQUENCE. This video piece is a study using digital media tools newly acquired by the fine arts department. The focus of the piece is on light value and textural abstraction. -Chris Cheadle (video author)
In writing for Frozen Sequence, I focused on the textures and their movements. The video is comprised of six themes. I composed sounds that were specific to those images. These theme-specific sounds are slightly altered each time the theme is presented. As the video progresses, sounds from one theme are layered onto others and some sounds bleed into other themes to create a more complex sound, and to provide development and unity.- Nicole Carroll

2001-2002 Academic Year

NATHAN SHEFFIELD : FEAR. This composition was inspired by a screenplay that I started writing this summer. The movie is about fears and phobias, some of it being based on my own crippling fears. Everyone has something that they're afraid of, but do you ever hear the voice of fear inside your mind? It haunts you forever, laughing at each tear you shed and every spasm of horror you experience when you come face to face with what frightens you. Fear controls everything that you do. The terror could be so intense that you shut out the rest of the world and become engulfed by the blackness that fear creates. Fortunately, I'm not afraid of the dark...

MATTHEW CURETON : CONCRETE 9517. Concrete 9517 is a textural piece comprised of three main textures. The first texture is very tense and rhythmically complicated. The second texture is more relaxed and free. The final texture is chaotic. This composition is written in the style of musique concrete, which attempts to organize natural sounds in a logical manner. In the case of this piece, all of the sounds are derived from a squeaky chair (serial #9517), which is located in the ASU Electronic Music Studio.

TIMOTHY CRIST : STUDY NO. 1 FOR TUBA AND ORGANIZED SOUND. Study No. 1 was composed for tubist, Ed Owen. It is the first work in a series of pieces for instrument and organized sound. In this piece, the entire recorded part is comprised of sounds originally taken from a solo tuba improvisation. These sounds are modulated to achieve various shapes and effects. During the work’s performance, the soloist employs a number of extended techniques including singing while playing, extended register pitches, and quarter tones.

CHRISTOPHER CHEADLE : DATA STREAM (NOTHING'S HAPPENING, SOMETHING'S HAPPENING...) : Heavily influenced by the works of Samuel Beckett as well as a recent obsession with the ideas of cubism and structure in space, much of Data Stream is concerned with a defining of individual particulars carried along in a chain of occurrences that, while processing motion, lack a sense of furthering development. All the tones within this piece were generated on a digital synthesizer and processed in a digital audio editing and sequencing program.

JOSH TRAVIS : DEFENSE. This piece was created with sounds derived from manipulation of the glockenspiel presets' tonal palate on a Roland xp-30 synthesizer. These sounds were further affected through the use of digital audio editing. The focus in this piece is on varying degrees of tension among tones, and thecorrelation of these tensions to those tensions obseved among humans.

ERIK JOHANSEN : HAUNTING. This short work experiments with space, sound, and texture. The piece was composed using various mechanical sounds from the Electronic Music Studio. These sounds included a squeaky chair, a friend laughing, and a book being dropped on the floor. The sounds were then assembled to create a musical structure which may conjure up "haunting" sounds characteristic of Halloween. As the piece develops, there becomes more depth and movement of sound, in a tranquil-like atmosphere. The piece culminates in an extreme dynamic crescendo and a final "slamming" of the door.

TIM MILLER : NUCLEAR WINTER. Designed to create an atmosphere suggestive of post-nuclear war, Nuclear Winter is centered around one basic sound. This sound is the first sound you will hear, and is used repetitively and developed throughout the work. Listen for and imagine yourself in this season of sound. The work was composed using a digital synthesizer and processed in a digital audio editing and sequencing program.

NICOLE CARROLL : BASSOON TEXTURES. The initial idea behind Bassoon Textures was to create the feeling of time distortion and swirling textures. To achieve these effects, slow and fast sounds are juxtaposed and recurring sounds are gradually developed to produce sounds quite different than the original. An example of musique concrete, this piece is composed entirely of bassoon samples. Two primary sounds were used to generate all of the sounds within the piece. One is a long, high tone. The other was created by placing a microphone into the bassoon bell and recording breath noises.

TIMOTHY CRIST : STUDY NO. 2 FOR OBOE AND ORGANIZED SOUND. Study No. 2 was written for oboist, Dan Ross. All the material on the recorded part was generated from a single note played on a guitar. A number of interactions between the performer and recorded part occur. For instance, in the sections where the pitch A dominates the recorded part, the A also appears in the oboe part, albeit it slightly out of tune. This intonation conflict is one of the primary motives in the opening section. The conflict between the various tunings of the pitch A result in the oboe’s pitch becoming increasingly unstable. Ultimately resulting in a frenzy of random pitches. The tape part also contributes to this randomness of pitch. The equipment used to produce this work, a Digidesign Pro Tools workstation, was funded by the Arkansas State University Faculty Grant Research Committee.

JOSH TRAVIS : EXTIRPATION OF FLORESCENCE. This piece was influenced primarily by my distaste for fluorescent lighting, the state of mind it encourages, and its correlation to the predominant ethos of modern industrialized society. The sounds were produced with an ARP 2600 synthesizer and microphonic feedback. The sounds were then ordered and manipulated via digital audio editing software.

NICOLE CARROLL : MY LOVE IS BUILDING... This piece is based on poems by Amy Lowell and E.E. Cummings. From Lowell’s "The Giver of Stars", I used the first line: "Hold your soul open for my welcoming". From Cummings’ "My Love is Building a Building", I chose the following lines: "My love is building a building around you/ …beginning at the singular beginning of your smile/…my love is building a magic/ a discrete tower of magic". All of the sounds in the piece are vocally derived. The primary focus of the beginning is on the non- textual sounds, with the recitations of the text being secondary. Then, those sounds and text become equally dominant, with the piece culminating in a purely text based ending. This piece is dedicated to Stuart Myers, whose everlasting smile gave me the inspiration to compose My Love is Building…

VICTOR SWAIN : TRANSFORLUTION. Transforlution (combination of transformation and evolution) comes from my love for percussive sound and odd rhythms. Along with this, is the need for flow and contrast much as a part of life. The piece is an overall transformation of one sound. From this sound, three transpositions were produced. Every musical gesture in the piece is derived from these three transpositions. The sounds were created on a Roland XP-30 synthesizer and were manipulated using a digital audio editor.

MATTHEW CURETON : POINTED CIRCLE. Pointed Circle is what might be classified as a cyclical composition, in such that the listener is whisked away from the initial sound to a distant place and eventually brought back to the beginning. All sounds were generated using an ARP 2600 synthesizer and were digitally edited in Pro Tools.

JOSH TRAVIS : DISRUPTION. This intent of this piece is to disrupt the naturally occurring circadian rhythms that exist in the human body, in hopes of evoking new patterns of thought, and as a means of underscoring the chemical nature of human emotion. The piece was composed using sounds culled from a Roland XP-30 synthesiser, which were ordered and manipulated via digital audio editing software.

TIM MILLER : INTERRUPTED ERROR [work in progress]. Interruption Error was composed using a synthesizer and digital audio editing. The idea of the piece starts with three sounds all heard at the same time. Each sound is then developed in its own way. The title suggests false communication between two beings, and the goal of this piece is to reflect that communicate error. This excerpt represents the first section of a three section work.

NICOLE CARROLL : EUCHRE. [video by Christopher Cheadle] To complement the repetitive elements of the video, I took a minimalist approach to composing the music. I wanted the music to portray different perspectives of a single sound, or theme, as the video does. Therefore, I focused on one sound element, that of a playing card attached to a spoke of a spinning bicycle wheel. That single sound was processed in a number of ways, and slow sounds were juxtaposed against faster sounds to mimic the movement of the visuals. My goal in doing so was to not only evoke different images through the sound, but also to create the feeling of shifting time.

MATTHEW CURETON : TWO STUDY PIECES : I. OUTSIDE, II. IN. These two compositions are study pieces in spatialization. With the new equipment we received that allows us to record in quadraphonics, I explored new possibilities in the layering of sounds and sound movement. The two pieces are related in that they are different perspectives on the same idea. In much the same way that Erik Satie wrote his Trois Gymnopédies. In the first composition, the experience should be perceived as if the listener is outside of the sound, and it is passed around you. The second piece is to give the sensation that you are being bathed in sound. From time to time little bubbles of sound peek through the underlying current. All sounds were taken from an ARP 2600 synthesizer and digitally edited using Pro Tools.

VICTOR SWAIN : DISORIENTATION. This piece is a study in consistently changing the spatial positions of sounds, causing the listener to guess where the next will come from. Another element employed in the composition of this piece is to change the timing of sonic events in order to confuse the piece’s plot. The elements of this composition were derived from an amplified electric guitar. The sounds of the guitar were initially processed with slight distortion and chorusing. The sounds were then further processed with digital signal processing tools.

TIM MILLER : MIST ILLUSION. Mist Illusion, for a quadraphonic sound system, was composed using sounds from an ARP 2600 synthesizer and digital effects. Each sound develops individually without becoming affected by other sounds in the work. The spatial positioning of the sounds is very important. The title of the piece suggests how one might feel if a question is left unanswered.

NICOLE CARROLL : THE HOLLOW MEN [Quadraphonic remix]. The Hollow Men is based on T.S. Eliot’s poem, "The Hollow Men". All sounds in the piece are derived from the recitation of the poem, performed by Mr. Ed Owen. The form closely follows that of the poem until the end of movement IV, where phrases from previous movements are reiterated before proceeding to the final movement. The piece focuses on the repetitive sounds of the text. The most prevalent sounds of each stanza are reinforced with the underlying sounds, which are mutations of the text. To maintain the static, unemotional feeling I tried to convey in the original version, the recitation is constantly present around the entire room, with the underlying sounds diffused, or moved, through the room. Thanks again to Mr. Owen.

JOSH TRAVIS : DISSEMINATION. This piece focuses on the changing of information as it is disseminated through various mediums. This idea is represented in the piece by the stating of a main theme, a tinkling, off-kilter piano line, restated in different forms on each of the four speakers in a quadraphonic sound system. The background motives are also treated in this manner, but are affected in a less forward manner. All sounds were derived from the Roland xp-30 synthesizer, and manipulated with digital audio editing software.