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Incidents
Incidents for fixed electronics
ARTIST: Nate Belasco, ’11
NOTES: Incidents is a piece made of fragments of sound containing within in them multiple layers.  Each fragment was created or captured in an incidental fashion and manipulated or re-organized haphazardly.  Analog and digital sound sources are interwoven into fleeting configurations and chaotic sequences.  Fractal-like editing methods were employed throughout the stages of processing, with each fragment retaining only a shadow of its original context.  Musical moments are displaced by entropic interruptions, mercilessly abandoning preceding spectrums and behaviors.
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state/status/standing
state/status/standing for fixed electronics
ARTIST: James Staub, ’11
NOTES: Composed from home-recorded sounds of various metals. Ideas are developed on macro and micro levels in patterns of three, although no strict process is employed. The piece aims to preserve, yet redirect the natural energies of the sounds to create new cause and effect relationships.
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Tel’ ooma en’ i’ shae
Tel’ ooma en’ i’ shae for fixed electronics
ARTIST: Edward Young, ’11
NOTES: This piece, made entirely from vocal sounds (including but not limited to: screaming, burping, speaking, and grunting) explores the connection between voice and noise, creating an undulating and fluctuating piece wherein Elvish is the language and [what could be considered] the ocean is the mediator.
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Spirals
Spirals for fixed electronics
ARTIST: Dean Russel, ’11
NOTES: Spirals is a choir of recorded voice sounds, taken from the range of one performer. Harmonically, all tones were shifted to accurately match the strongest harmonics present in two Balinese Gamelan bells (pitch shifted down several octaves). These bells are designed to be played together, and because of their slight “out-of-tune” nature, produce a shimmering effect. This beating is precisely why they were chosen, with hopes that all subsequently tuned material would be more interesting than basing all tones on a source of less harmonic complexity.
The pitches of the voice begin to extend past these harmonics using the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) as a method of deriving new pitches, resulting in modulation through new and contrasting tones. As the tones grow higher the unfamiliar tuning becomes more obvious. Eventually all sets of Fibonacci derived pitches are played in combination, coloring the sonorities in a new and interesting manner.
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That Can Be Dematerialized
That Can Be Dematerialized for fixed electronics
ARTIST: Zachary Zukowski, ’11
NOTES: There are real things. They are everywhere, and at some point, they may become computerized. If this happens, they will disappear from reality and reappear from the static world of read-only memory! This is where digital entities begin their transition from being the fragmented representations of real things to the replacements for real things. That Can Be Dematerialized examines these stages of their metamorphosis.
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Variations on a Lonely Theme
Variations on a Lonely Theme for bass guitar and electronics
ARTIST: Brandon Green, ’10
NOTES: Variations on a Lonely Theme was composed during the winter of 2010 and represents an interest in the use of live and prepared electronics in a performance setting. The piece evolved from a short melodic theme for electric bass, and takes the listener through a gradual destruction of that theme. Each section explores a few small elements of the theme and incorporates live delay, pitch-shifting and other processing techniques. Included in the mix are several prepared electronic cues, which amplify a certain emotional quality within each destructive section. The piece ends with a modified recapitulation of the main theme, signifying a musical jamais vu, caused by the musical events in between the two.
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Le Mirliton
Le Mirliton for flute and electronics
ARTIST: Christopher Catone, ’10
NOTES: Le Mirliton is based on the idea of “a musical instrument which produces sound primarily by way of a vibrating stretched membrane.” The mirliton was also used as a toy flute instrument in France during 16th and 17th centuries. It produced music akin to the comb music of the nursery.
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Density Riot
Density Riot for fixed electronics
ARTIST: Brian Dixon, ’09
NOTES: Density Riot is a piece that was written in Composition for Electronic Instruments, for which the assignment was to create a work using the human voice as its only source. I took a short sample of someone (a member of the Music Dept. faculty) laughing and tried to work from its natural rhythms as well as develop some of the smaller, more subtle noises in the recording.  The title is an anagram of the name of the person laughing in the source material.
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culture shock
culture shock for fixed electronics
ARTIST: Robert Seaback, ’09
NOTES: culture shock uses sounds from everyday media including television, radio, computers, etc. and reflects the bombardment of this material that we are often subject to.  Reactions include tension, frustration, apathy, boredom, daydream…
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untitled
Untitled
ARTIST: Adam Straus ’14
NOTES: This track was inspired by the Playstation One video game LSD: Dream Emulator, a video game based upon the dream journal of its creator. In the game, the player walks around in an extremely surreal world where touching just about anything will cause unexpected results, such as the sudden appearance of a pterodactyl or instant teleportation to an unrelated location. In the game, the player is the only character present, with the exception of a few mysteriously morbid characters, such as a man in a robe who tries to kill you, or a faceless woman who hangs herself. I tried to reflect the desolation in my project by having a lot of aural space and a fair amount of silence. Also, I tried to replicate the nervous, on-edge feeling that the complete unpredictability of the game creates by having the music be rather disjointed and atonal. In the game, it is not uncommon for even the strangest of dream sequences to just end abruptly, and I reflected that in the music by having the piece end similarly, leaving the listener with no ability to anticipate when or how the piece will end.