Hollow Voices
In 2020 while studying at the University of Iowa, I took a collaborative course coordinated by the Music and Dance departments. During our time in this course my fellow students and I joined in varying groups to produce three different collaborative works of art. Hollow Voices is one of these projects, co-created with Julia Cooper-Pelkey.
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It began as both physical and sonic exploration of an open gallery space. Julia brought with her to the space a long, sheer veil she hoped would prove useful to the project (it most certainly did). I brought to the space music I'd previously composed for bassoon (Solo, for Bassoon) as well as my very new explorations of electronics.
Shown here is one of my earliest Max patches, the Spectral Blender. It's an ensemble of ten brickwall filters used to split two audio sources into five bands of approximately equal aural strength. The blender panel's sliders allow the user to crossfade between either of the two sounds. This is the central idea of the patch: blending sounds across their spectral profiles.
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The wind sounds heard in this piece are produced from careful manipulations of a recording of my Solo, for Bassoon (as performed by Keegan Hockett), as well as excerpts recorded live in the space. These manipulations were then layered using this patch, further manipulated using variations of the frequency window ranges of the brickwall filters, and then interpolated with the blender panel.
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This patch, and Hollow Voices, represent my earliest explorations of subtractive synthesis as a means for creating hybrid or totally original sounds. From here I would go on to develop ideas that would become my Noise Sculptor.