Notes On presence: A Music Installation for Phantom Chamber Orchestra

There are some ideas which, though not inherently musical, are best rendered in musical form. Perhaps because the idea is slippery and requires the fleetingness of music to gain a feeling for it, or perhaps sonification brings the wisp of an idea into a realm where the brain can experience its structure on a more reptilian level. My music installations to this point have had as their genesis an idea or ideas of this sort. One that I have been pursuing for some time is the relationship between communication patterns in their most primal, naturally occurring form (for example between birds, cicadas, or humans), and the seemingly new and technologically mediated modes of communication that are rampantly evolving.

The Passerine Song Cycle

About five years ago I composed a piece for player piano called The Passerine Song Cycle. I was inspired by a series of frequency/time graphs (spectrographs) plotted from tape recordings of bird songs that I found in a book by the ornithologist Donald J. Borror. I wanted to translate these images back into sonic form, though more readily accessible to the human ear. The player piano was the perfect mechanism for this, as the piano rolls are also frequency/time graphs. I rolled a blank piano roll on the floor and with a marker drew out the contours of the spectrographs. I then punched the holes according to these marks, excluding the notes outside of a particular Japanese scale I wanted to work within. The overall process ran as follows: the original bio-acoustic signal was converted to an electrical signal via microphone, then magnetically imprinted onto tape, then fed through the spectrograph machine where it was plotted on a graph, then mapped geometrically to another two-dimensional visual plane (the piano roll), and finally was read by another mechanical system which rendered the image back into an acoustic signal.

My question was: after all of these translations, conversions of energy, and a successive fixing and releasing of a naturally occurring signal, what becomes of the original message? After repeated listening my feeling is that the technology used did not affect the birdsong in any fundamental way—that is, the message I received [Begin Page 36] from listening to this piano piece had the same quality to what I had heard listening to birds in the field. Furthermore, it sounded better to me than most piano music I had heard before. This confirmed my idea that certain technologies, if used carefully, could act as more or less neutral translators of natural occurring phenomena into musical terms. I think of the player piano as the first sampler—the first machine capable of rendering a displaced performance—and as such, the progenitor of much of the technology used to compose music today. Since The Passerine Song Cycle, I have composed most of my subsequent work on an up-to-date computer-based sampler, including my most recent music installation, presence.

presence
For Phantom Chamber Orchestra

presence originated from the intuition that on a very specific plane the communication patterns of primitive species, humans, and computer networks are the same thing, and that this thing is sonorous in spirit. I had a premonition of a society of incorporeal bird-people-computers communicating through auditory signals which, though emanating from individual entities, were radically displaced—having their origin in a future-primordial void.

I also wanted to write an orchestral piece in which I could explore some potential intersections of conventional composition techniques with the revolution that has taken place in the area of digital audio, especially the ability to instantly access any section of a large repository of recorded sound. The process of composing presence fell into two discrete phases. First, I wrote the orchestral parts and sampled the performance of each musician separately in a recording studio—this phase only happened once. Second, I composed the...