Music for the installation project
SAWASDEE
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To listen to selected excerpts from EXUSIAI, click below. People with slower modem connections should use the "28.8k" option. SAWASDEE Tram Song (56k connections) SAWASDEE Tram Song (28.8k connections) SAWASDEE Signals (56k connections) SAWASDEE Signals (28.8k connections)
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The Making of SAWASDEE The city of Graz in Austria is in the valley of the Mur River, bounded to the west by the last foothills of the Alps and to the north and east by what are known as the Steierischer hills. It is quite old, as the Romans found there way there as early as 16 BC. The Habsburg emperor chose Graz for the imperials residence in the 14th Century, and the Prince Frederick III lived there. Old Graz is one of the most extensive historic city centers in the German-speaking world. In October 1996, while on tour in Europe with my ACID KARAOKE project, I received a proposal from ESC im Labor, a gallery space specializing in new media located in the heart of the city of Graz. Ms Reni Hoffmüller, director of ESC im Labor, had heard my piece KAMIYA BAR (New Tone Records, 1995) and had an idea. While KAMIYA BAR is a music composition based on the urban soundscape of Tokyo, how about making a new piece, based on the soundscape of Graz? I wasn't really familiar with the city of Graz and had never been there, but I was intrigued with the idea. First of all, I enjoy Europe and the European soundscape, especially its mix of the very old and the very new sounds. And I felt it was an interesting challenge to make a fresh piece using city sounds from a new place. I made my piece KAMIYA BAR because I every time I was fortunate to visit Japan I was fascinated by the wealth of sounds in the city. As wrote in my program notes for the premiere of KAMIYA BAR at Tokyo-FM in 1992 "For the foreigner who beholds the Tokyo soundscape for the first time, without language comprehension the impression can only be one of fascination and bewilderment. We are assaulted by sound images everywhere we turn. The sweet-potato peddler, the elevator girls, the sounds of the Tsukiji fish market, the train-stations, the politicians who lecture from trucks, the abacus lessons on the radio, the television commercials all hypnotize. Perhaps the experience is that like a first-born infant, fresh into the world, amazed by sounds without any comprehension beyond childlike intuition as to their nature. " Would I find the sounds of Graz as overtly and obviously fascinating as the sounds of Tokyo? Maybe not. In fact, probably not. But even so, it might be interesting to seek out the subtle sounds that are special in a city and see what kind of composition might result. So I accepted the challenge of Ms Hoffmüller to create this new composition, which I call SAWASDEE. To begin creating SAWASDEE, a certain number of pre-compositional decisions had to be made. One was about the working methodology. Unlike KAMIYA BAR, where the sounds had been recorded in Tokyo but the composition was realized and produced in the USA over the course of four months, this new piece would be recorded and realized in a three-week period in the city of Graz itself. And the work would exist in two versions, one, a concert piece which I would perform on the last day of my three-week residency, and the second as an installation which would run in the gallery after I departed. So, in November 1998, off to Graz I went to make SAWASDEE. Esc im Labor armed me with the tools I needed: a map, a DAT recorder, microphones, a computer and more. I spent the next week taking trams and buses, and walking throughout the city, especially the oldest parts, tape recorder on and running, batteries recharging while I transferred recordings from DAT to hard disk every night, using Cubase Score. As the recordings developed I created general categories for the types of sounds I found myself gathering: street sounds - media sounds - radio, TVtram sounds bell sounds - church bells, carillons etc.language Some of the richest materials that I gathered were somehow language based. There are quite a few dialects in the Graz area. When I recorded the sounds of a farmer's market I could catch quite a few of them, and many sounded really interesting. Also, the trams proved a fertile source for mechanical sounds and also language based materials, as I tried not eavesdop too obviously on the many conversations going on inside. Over 6 hours of recordings, now on hard disk, were reviewed and edited. One aesthetic decision I made early on was not to necessarily eliminate sounds like might otherwise be considered recording flaws, for example wind noise or microphone handling sounds. Intuitively I felt it would be good to preserve these sounds, not only for their textural interest but because they tended to imply my own perspective as a "visitor" recordist. With the sounds now edited and catalogued on harddisk I began to formulate SAWASDEE structurally. I created a kind of master two-channel stereo file which was the sonic backbone to the music. To create this I relied on a graphic score that gave me direction as to how the many sounds of Graz would combine. I sometimes filled in the sounds abstractly, using the categories I had defined as guides. Sometimes I used a more intuitive "musical" approach. This master file was about one hour long and combined many of the diverse elements I had recorded in a collage. I also created about ten or so separate sound files of different materials that especially caught my musical imagination. Some of these I left "raw" and some I subjected to computer-based processing using such devices as the time-correction algorithm in Cubase Score (by setting the parameters to their extremes, I found lots of interesting sound-artifacts and errors that I felt were musically useful). I also used some VST plugins within Cubase to process some of these files. Now that I had created all my files, I had the musical "ammunition" to perform. I then built a variety of patches in MAX/MSP which were designed to trigger these files and process them in realtime. The main MSP patch that I relied on was one I created as a kind of serial delay network. Sound files could be read off the hard disk, scaled in volume and passed to a stereo delay with variable time parameters (maximum delay 5000 milliseconds). The outputs were then mixed with the direct input and passed after level scaling to the next delay network, which had different time parameters. This process was repeated for a total of fourteen times, meaning that at the end, I could have as many as 16384 delays. Alert readers who have been following this column from near the beginning may recognize this as a realtime version of the tape-delay technique I used to make my piece SUKOTHAI back in 1979. I also made a patch in MSP that would allow me to playback my files using various random access techniques. One technique was to step through the file 250 milliseconds at a time, but starting at the end and moving toward the beginning of the file at 500 millisecond intervals. I found this a nice "staggering" technique. To perform SAWASDEE, I set the main file in motion and routed it through my various MSP patches. Using a Peavy 1600x midi mixer I could control all the variables such as delay times, feedback, pitch shifts, stagger intervals and more. The Peavy was also mapped to allow me to trigger other sound files on the fly. Support Staff for Sawasdee equipment software CARL STONE, 12/98 reprinted from SOUND & RECORDING Magazine, 2/99 issue |