Recording of Klaus Ager's C.L.B. 512 for clarinet and recording.

The Question Mark's Black Ink was inspired, in part, by a poem by S.L. Hough (opposite), from which the title comes. Though not programmatic, the work was influenced by the atmosphere of the poem as well as its implicit psychological dichotomy, of which the contrast of tape and live performers may be taken as representative. There also exists a unity between the tape and the acoustic sounds, however, because the sounds on the tape were all taken from the instruments playing: piano (bowed, plucked, and played on the keyboard), and percussion (tam-tam, vibes, bells, cymbals, gongs, all both struck and bowed). Once sampled into the Synclavier II digital synthesizer, the sounds underwent various significant transformations including filtering, splicing, mixing, and other digital concrete techniques. The Synclavier II used for this realization was purchased on a grant form the University of Southern California Faculty Research and Innovation Fund. This work is dedicated to S.L. Hough and to Vicki Ray (piano) and Mark Nicolay (percussion) who commissioned the piece and first performed it.

Recording of Charles Amirkhanian's Walking Tune (a room-music for Percy Grainger). Inspired by Grainger's Walking Tune for piano solo, Amirkhanian uses a Synclavier digital synthesizer to combine sounds from multiple locations, along with the sounds of a violin and voice. The violin and voice part is performed by Elizabeth Baker of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Sinfonia Concertante is modeled on the dramatic essence of its classic namesake: the interplay of the chamber orchestra and the computer music narrative; of sweet consonance and angry dissonance; of innocence and duplicity; of pleasure and sorrow. The text for the taped narrative heard through the piece is formed from excerpts from ten letters written by Mozart from Mannheim and Paris to his father in Salzburg during a nine-month period from November 22, 1777, to July 9, 1778. The text was digitally recorded in English translation by German actor Stefan Hurdalek, whose voice also served as the source for all computer music heard on the tape. The taped computer music was realized at the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., while the composer was guest in residence from February to mid-May, 1986, at the invitation of Charles Dodge, Director of the Center. Special voice analysis/synthesis techniques, developed by composer Paul Lansky of Princeton University, were utilized to achieve the pitched, talking-singing timbres and events. The orchestral score was composed at MacDowell Colony during six winter weeks in 1986 in New Hampshire and, later, five spring weeks at Yaddo in New York. The piece was commissioned by the Cleveland …

The business language of communication is the starting point of my septet. The language is broken down here in their smallest elements. By this there is not a semantic relation, but a phonetic plain which has come into being. The singer uses vowels, diphthongs, later consonants. The parts become more and more full of noise and have only heard the explosive consonants. At the same time, the electronics continually envelope the part, and after the time of the greatest modulation.

Recording of Jonathan Berger's Diptych.

Recording of Peter Beyls' Arena.

Recording of Philippe Blanchard's La Boîte de Pandore.

"Lag" is built with a material that is both concrete and synthesized, where electronic sounds play an impersonal, imitative role while the concrete material, consisting of various short musical excerpts that have a great significance for me, is deeply processed. and thus an electronic appearance. Gradually, during the piece, which has the shape of an inverted arc, these functions are so altered that in the end the relation is opposite. Order of the Swedish Radio, composed in 1986, this music is dedicated to my brother for his sixtieth birthday.

When you reach "the zenith of your life", you may be tempted to look at your past. Moving forward to the future is not easy. Reflections on the past can occur spontaneously without a particular structure, and by fugitive associations. Memories of various episodes appear unrelated. For Jon II is a piece where the main form of music is based on a similar process. The various parts of the piece seem to lack obvious connections and a clear structure principle for the whole piece. Small episodes or "little musical stories" follow each other without any apparent sequence, which means brutal changes and sharp contrasts, as the most important characters of the composition. The piece is divided into 3 movements. The first two movements can be played separately. The designation of the 3 movements is I: vivace, II: Intermezzo and III: finale. For Jon II is the last part of a book that has 4 and is now complete. The other pieces are: For Jon I (fragments of a time to come) 1977; For Jon III (they extricated their extremities) 1982; Epilogue; rhapsody of the second harvest, 1979.

The musical idea of ​​this piece - apart from the ventral expression, direct and inexplicable - is the multiplication of sounds; each played sound produces a multitude of other sounds; contrapuntal, barely audible, fireworks, etc. As far as the technical aspect is concerned, the structure of the IT processes is part of the idea of ​​controlling a sound computer by something more imminent and more subtle than the computer keyboard keys, than potentiometers or a mouse. . The sound of the piano is picked up by microphones, processed by a signal processor (the DSP16X of the Swiss Center of Computer Music, programmed by Nicolas Sordet) and reinjected by means of loudspeakers. We then try to obtain a mix, between the acoustic sound of the piano and the sound produced by the computer, as balanced as possible, the speakers being placed around the piano accordingly. This is how the piano seems sometimes multiplied sometimes transformed into an instrument with new sounds. The process consists of analyzing zero crossings of the order form and reacting to the sound thus analyzed according to pre-established rules. Different sets of rules thus generate the different sections of the part. The piano has established macrostructures, but …

Recording of Richard Boisvert and Steve Langevin's Northern Line.

This piece was created in 1985 at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University on the Samxon Box Digital Concepts Synthesizer. It was inspired by an early morning walk in Vondelpark in Amsterdam and was made in conjunction with a film, also by the composer. The pigeon of the title "Pigeon Fantasies" is in some sense the protagonist of the film. Water is an important image in the piece. Great pains were taken to resynthesize the sound of water, using a program devised by Julius Smith. The program is a phase vocoder-based analysis/synthesis system able to track inharmonic partials. It was designed to model piano tones. Sound generating techniques included additive synthesis as well as digitally recorded and processed natural water sounds and frequency modulation synthesis. Both the music and the film were created with the intention that they could function separately as well as together.

Recording of Gabriel Brnčić's Des Etres. This work is dedicated to the memory of Oscar Masotta, a specialist in psychoanalysis and semiology. This is music that recalls the atmosphere of the first montages of the imaginary theater that Oscar Masotta created in the 60s in Buenos Aires and to which I collaborated by producing infinite quantities of sound. Now, a viol and a computer, in eight-voice polyphony, constitute this absence of being, constantly speaking of its presence.

Litany for the Dead is a composition comprised only of vocal sounds - 2 female and 2 male voices. 1 male speaks a traditional Hebrew prayer that dissolves into the female reading of a traditional Christian Prayer both extensively processed. These provide a kind of harmony (ostinato) for the other voices reading and singing (with vocalise). 3 poems taken from the 14 haiku poems series called Litany for the Dead by Nick Virgilis, poet & author. The poems chosen as they appear in the music are: 1. stoking the ovens/ rising from the smoke and flames/ the names of the dead, 2. the starving village:/ a shriveled shaman chants/ the names of the dead, 3. gladiola bulbs/ wrapped in old newspaper / the names of the dead. The poems are broken down into vowel & consonant sounds and sung, strained, spoken, whispered, etc. then articulated in a clearer way; though music elements override intelligibility at times. Subtleties are focused on which usually required a few listenings to perceive all of the vocalizations. This piece was made with full authorisation and permission of the poet.

Recording of Ton Bruynèl's "Kolom".

Recording of Burt Warren's Racter and Eliza- A computer opera (of mistakes). For computer voice synthesis. Racter and Eliza are two computer programs which were early attempts at artificial intelligence. The computers were ran by feeding the outputs of one into the input of the other and they were able to interact. Using an Amiga computer little speech synthesis was used, and the voices were fed through a malfunctioning pitch to voltage converter; resulting the electronic accompaniment.

This composition is built on the axiom that at the basis of the musical invention there are not only the sounds of tempered height and harmonic timbre but also the complex sounds, and especially those constituted by inharmonic spectra. The spectral complexity is the reference characteristic on which all the relationships of internal relationship to this piece are constructed, granting a clear preference, even on a purely aesthetic level, to the most harsh and dissonant multifonical sounds. The overall phonic result is thus maintained in a medium high density threshold, in an area where the difference between harmonic spectra and inharmonic spectra is ambiguous, while the harmonic relations in the superposition of different timbres is simplified to the maximum to allow a clear perception of the timbric dough.

Cordes de Nuit was assembled in MIDI code and produced using a rack of DX/TX FM sound modules. The work is based on single voice and is structurally modelled after the sound of distinguished violinist Paul Kling, former concert-master of the Tokyo and St. Louis Orchestras. Global and micro changes in vibrato are controlled using mixes between Pythagorean and Equal-Tempered tunings. Over 200 spectral bandwidths are often sounded simultaneously. The work is dedicated to Iannis Xenakis whom I studied with in 1972.

Recording of John Celona's Emerald Soft.

Recording of John Celona's Pacific Rims.

"Ellipse" is a music designed for a mime. The musical structure follows exactly the scenario proposed by the mime, while trying to integrate as much as possible to the movements performed on stage. The sound material is very small. All the music was built from two synthetic sounds programmed on a Yamaha DX 7 synthesizer and breathing sounds, sampled by a PPG synthesizer. Compositionally, the work is designed to establish a single formal unit. The development is very progressive and always attached to the same theme - that of the beginning, which, after all the transformations undergone, returns to the end to complete the trajectory of the ellipse. Formally, the music has three major parts defined according to the action expressed by the mime: - The first part presents the basic motif, whose envelope marked by the change of the pitch, becomes clear through the progressive widening of the duration of the sound. - In the second part, the breath that was present from the beginning as a component of the timbre becomes an independent element. The melodic motifs undergo harmonic modulations and are transformed into timbres by rhythmic accelerations. - In the third part the thematic elements assume dramatic …

Recording of Eric Chasalow's Left to his own devices (To Milton Babbitt at 80). In this work, the composer combined archival interviews with Milton Babbitt with a virtual RCA synthesizer. This music draws on quotations from Babbitt’s instrumental music performed by the sounds of the RCA. The text composited of phrases that Milton has spoken many times over the years. The composer has tried to intensify these phrases by building a dramatic, musical structure both from them and around them.

In short: the "support" on tape is a very capillary tension of the "Fantasia" for flute alone. The canon - in 4 parts - of the "Fantasia" is realized (here it is only a tale "virtual" and melodic point) by groups of four voices each; the most acute of the groups is a game of echoes with the same note as the flute alone. In addition, within the 24 parts, several sizes all specular shapes and three transpositions (1/3 of a tone each time). The three inner groups are recorded with a contralto flute. Always by Roberto Fabbriciani. The stylistic goal is to get a labyrinth delirious around the solo instrument: like a huge vegetation that stifles a small plant.