Electroacoustic Works & Soundscapes
Everyday life is "captured" visually through our eyes, acoustically through our ears, and kinesthetically, through our body. Using forms such as painting, sculpture, music, and dance, daily events can be transformed by art into an aesthetic moment. Electroacoustic soundscape compositions can be an excellent vehicle for this transformation of commonplace acoustic phenomena.
Electronic Compositions
Sands of Time
An electroacoustic collage comprised of four voices: the clock from my dormitory room, sand from New Hampshire, the door of the electronic music studio opening and closing, and my own voice.
Etude for Cymbal & Computer
One suspended cymbal and a computer, utilizing the interactive programming software MaxMSP in a live performance, created an interesting variation of cymbal tonality.
Soundscores for Dance
Collaborating with choreographer Rebecca Patek, environmental sounds, both natural and man made, have been utilized as the music of dance. Performances of these dances have included the Mulberry Street Theater in NYC, the Fringe Festival and Glue Performance Series in Philadelphia, and the Redfern Arts Center on Brickyard Pond, Keene State College, Keene, New Hampshire.
One
This electroacoustic soundscape composition was composed in collaboration with choreographer Rebecca Patek
Tuesday
This electroacoustic soundscape composition weaves three different recordings into a tapestry of sounds
Soundscapes
The term soundscape has a very specific meaning. It was first utilized by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer to apply to any acoustic field of study. Schafer was the head of a group of composers at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, who pioneered the study of environmental sounds by recording the soundscape of their city. A soundscape composition is further defined by composer Barry Truax, as follows:
“The essential difference between an electroacoustic composition that uses prerecorded environmental sounds as its source material, and a work that can be called a soundscape composition, is that in the former, the sounds loses all or most of its environmental context...In the soundscape composition, on the other hand, it is precisely the environmental context that is preserved, enhanced, and exploited by the composer.” - Acoustic Communication (2001)
Winterbeech and Pine
Focusing on wind sounds, I recorded the natural sounds around our home in rural New Hampshire
Home for the Summer
The integrated natural sounds of water and birds with an excerpt from the last movement of my composition, Perceptions
Spring in the Wetlands
The town is alive with the activity of newborn frogs, "Peepers", so named because of their incessant, vibrant calls
NUUC Soundscape
Material for this work was gathered from recordings of the sound environment around and within the sanctuary of the North Unitarian Universalist Congregation.