new music: Sketch(Sylvia)
April 28, 2014
Here's a short sound sketch using a few syllables from a recording of Sylvia Plath reading one of her poems.
I remember hearing Omagio a Joyce when I had just finished college. I didn't know much of anything, but I knew I loved that piece. Luciano Berio created a sonic structure based on a recording of Molly's monologue at the end of Ulysses. It's extraordinary, even more so given that it would have been manually sliced audio tape.
I was taking some composition classes at College Park, and had access to a good studio. Although I did try my hand at cutting tape, I started to write using a Fairlight and a short sample of Dylan Thomas ("and she rose with him, flowering in the melting snow"). Another piece that's lost to the unforgiving archive in my studio.
In the Dylan Thomas piece, I tried to take short phonetic material and extend the sound in some cases to create a melodic instrument. I've always come back to manipulation of a human voice (check out The Larkin Project, also on bandcamp). I really like what I'll call the blubabilablob effect. A cascading or flowering shower of sound all kind of based on a couple of related seed sounds.
Granular synthesis made this a lot easier, and now my ipad has such awesome glitch software available. Enjoy.