The Cotter Suite (2019)
This
collection of compositions uses themes developed from the locations, objects,
and people within the story Will’s
Notebook. The themes are used to inspire location sounds, processing
techniques, and guitar performances.
i.
The
Eternal Spring
The
Shepard Tone is a superposition of ascending or descending tones that crossfade
in such a way to create the illusion of constant motion. This is an eternal
spring of sonic motion.
Spectrogram showing
the Sheppard Tone of the bass section from The Eternal Spring.
The
sound sources come from a recording of the stream at Nitobe
Memorial Garden at UBC. My collogues and I dubbed it
Aoki’s Garden. The eternal spring is pure imagination to me, a fountain of
ideas always flowing. The ascending and descending scales on the guitar were
processed with the stream recording using granular synthesis (Truax, 1990) and
convolution (Roads, 1995, pp. 419–432) to produce textures and layers that
could be arranged to create the Sheppard Tone effect.
ii.
Parliament
of Owls
The
Owls are when we collect in a classroom. It begins with R. Murray Schafer
saying a in an
interview[1]
that “if problems are constructed carefully there will be as many solutions as
there are people in the class, or as many solutions as there are people with
ears…” This quote is used as the source
of processing and defines the rhythmic structure of the piece. Ambient
recording a of classroom is processed to pull out dominant frequencies that
trigger a vocoder version of Schafer’s quote. A recording of a parliament of
owls in the distance comes in and out to remind us of voices of the past. The
guitar melody was inspired by these voices.
iii.
Plains
of Reason
The
sound of wind in a field is used to trigger algorithms to produce scale tones
that eventually resolve to a pattern and a key. This was an experiment to find
patterns in a sound that seems to have none (wind in a field). It uses
convolution to isolate frequencies that are then converted to midi scale tones.
The inspiration for this piece was from my experience in a statistics class.
iv.
Forest
of Dispersion
The
idea of the Forest of Dispersion was how I felt entering my PhD studies. It
felt like there were so many paths and they were all so complicated. Choosing a
path was difficult but Ted Aoki’s book Curriculum in a New Key came at just the
right time. Aoki’s voice, so soft but with conviction, guided my journey
through this dense forest. At times, where I live the crows seem to take over,
and times when song birds solo, duet, and chorale with
their own soft conviction. The guitar is processed (convolution) with the song
birds to create chordal textures using common frequencies from each sound. This
seems to freeze moments where the birds and the guitar resonate.
v.
Tree
of Life
Another
sound that is quite common where I live is the constant drone of rain. It is
the source of life in a rain forest. This piece uses the ever-changing drone of
rain slowed down (granular synthesis) many times (up to x120) to process
(convolution) a guitar chord. This is a micro audition of both rain and my
guitar, which I have always thought of as the voice of a tree.