Interview with John Snow Badger, discussing his life experiences and viewpoints.

Interview with W. W. Cunningham, where he discusses his life experiences and viewpoints.

After my first experiences in musique concrète, and even more so, when I started using the computer for music composition, I wanted to be able to compose the sound material , as I composed the structures when I wrote "notes" for instrumentalists. Our first researches, from 1976 (by means of a microprocessor that we had procured for ourselves), were done in this direction: to put the sound matter in memory and to fragment it so that it became "reflowable". The microprocessor of this era providing little computational power, it was necessary to imagine sound-efficient methods, but inexpensive in calculation - and we then formulated and exploited the method of "zero crossing". Indeed, by sharing the sound in small isolated waveforms, each having the property to start and end on the zero axis (energy equal to 0 volts, corresponding to the rest position of the speaker's diaphragm) ), it is possible to glue these shapes together in any order (so to compose from a given set of elements) without losing too much of the sound quality (spectral content) of each element.

Lord Buddha turned his entire body round like an elephant, looked at the town of Vaisali, and uttered these words : O vaisali, this is the last time that I see you. For I an now departing for Nirvana ! At Gaya, at the time when I won enlightenment, I got rid of the causes of becoming, which are nothing but a gang of harmful vipers ; now the hour comes near when I get rid also of this body, the dwelling place of the acts accumulated in the past. Now that at last this body, which harbours so much ill, is on its way out; now that at last the frightful dangers of becoming are about to be extinct; now that at last I emerge from the vast and endless suffering-is that the time for you to grieve ? So spoke the sage of the Shakya tribe, and the thunder of his voice contrasted strangely with the deep calm with which he faced his departure. Each of us has our own dwelling place of the acts, and each of us can walk the path away from this dwelling place. This piece is an aural analog of such an action.

Commissioned by the company "Mafilm" of Budapest, and realized in the Electroacoustic studio of the Hungarian Radiodiffusion, the work was conceived as music for an imaginary film: the composer would be represented under the features of a character who, refusing the demystification imposed by modern science and technology, would travel in the moon and the sun, his old suitcase full of real anxieties and false sonorous phantasies, which will be, moreover, damaged and distorted during the course inconvenient. An exclusively "concrete" basic material (a few syllables sung on a fixed pitch, a few piano sounds, two trumpet notes, three notes of tuba, a sound) was processed according to some simple analog methods (speed variation, editing, mixing) and also using two digital devices: a harmonizer and the small Musix 81 processing system driven by a Sinclair ZX81.

In my composition "cockchafer, fly", I used some historical sound documents as a starting point and to allow associations of ideas for a musical development throughout the piece. The title of the composition is drawn from a children's song whose text expresses the sad situation after the first and the second world wars: "Cockchafer, fly, your father is the war, your mom is in Pom'ranie, Pomerania is destroyed by the flames, Cockchafer, fly. " Towards the end of the composition, this song will appear again with another text: "Sleep, my little sleep, outside there are two sheep, one black and one white, and if you do not want to sleep black will come and bite you. " In addition, I used a very famous Lale Anderson song: "Lili Marleen", in correspondence, in collage with an old student song: "boy, forward, even if it is for the last time". With these two quotes, I want to show how the spirits of men could be manipulated. These quotes are for me only a starting point that allows me to reflect and develop my personal musical point of view. At the end of the composition, I take the sentence of a poet: "a …

Recording of a personal letter to a family member about when they plan to come home for a visit.