Recording of Myron Schaeffer's Voices and Bells.

Recording of Paul Pedersen's Fantasie. This 8 minute, 2-track tape piece was composed in 1967 at the Mc Gill University electronic Music Studio. The work was conceived as a multimedia presentation using 3 projectors with hand painted slides by the Montreal artist Gino Bielanski. The piece is in 15 sections, which are synchronized with the fifteen slides used in the centre projector. Pitch organization in the work is centered on a 9 pitch series between 77 and 2335 Hz with successive pitches 200 Mels apart. Two sections involve the use of the Shephard Scale. The basic sound sources used are limited to white noise, sine and square waves. Much of the synthesis of the work was done using the channel Spectrogram developed by Dr. Hugh Le Caine of the National Research Council of Canada.

Recording of Dubravko Detoni's D. A radio composition for prepared harpsichord and magnetic tape with modified sounds of the harpsichord. It adds a tape made with the most different sounds coming from the harpsichord. The work consists of cadences and refrains constantly changing. The harpsichord alone performs the cadence (the center of the score), while the choruses (at the margins) are performed by the harpsichord and the tape. Each cadenza has a different disposition: ecstatic, resigned, imperceptible, hysterical, ironic. They reform to the refrains which represent another shade of gray each time. The ideological center of the composition is the sound "D" (re) which represents the individual, the protagonist around which the musical event takes place. Around its sounds accumulate sound layers (like the center around the man), which are realized on tape, that represent or give the association of a kind of distant universe.

Recording of Liliane Donskoy's La légende des merveilles du monde. I - Crystal: Bell rubbed with infinitesimal elements that are superimposed causing falls of the inexistent harmonics to the attentiveness of isolated elements. After a break. II - Rock: Sudden burst of macroscopic forms. Some rather short "frozen" sounds, interspersed, gradually lengthen, crumble, melt, merge, and little by little sink into a furious atmosphere, opaque magma. III - The Grotesque Figures of Fire: A random deaf rumble, fine loops, made of crunches and cracklings, on top of strange figures a little irritating like the contact of the flame. Breaths, slight atmospheric whistles, clouds bring: IV - Life in the water: Drops in falls, waters in disorder, worked in various ways, or succession of drops in organized "scales." Multiple shouting figures, often preceded "accompanied" (in the old sense of a kind of counter-subject) by an element imposing the image sound of a circle in a pocket (like the sound that introduces this scene and from which the first drop reflects) or still a shudder of city, brief or not. This entire episode, in several enchained sequences, ends in the swallowing of the sum of these multiple small energies, becoming a unique …

Recording of Iván Patachich's Metamorfosis per flauto.

Recording of Alcides Lanza's out of... This piece for solo tape is a re-elaboration of unused portions of various pieces by the composer and the electronic sounds were created with the Moog and Synthi AKS synthesizers. The piece refers to primitive forces at play, from the jungle sounds to the city jungle, from the primeval memories to the magnetic forces at play in the galaxies. All the 'human' sounds heard are below the level of semantic comprehensibility.

Recording of Dubravko Detoni's Phonomorphia I. Synthetic music based on the elements of the human voice and percussion. Two fundamental layers moving from positions of opposite heights meet in the middle and separate starting in different directions. This concrete and electronic study was developed at the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio in Warsaw.

Recording of Lucien Goethals's Studie VI. The basic material consists of rectangular waves. This material is subjected to various transformations by filtering. The octave is divided into 24 equal parts, so it is a quarter-tone piece. Various layers of sound (rhythm - melodic) are superimposed, which gives shape to a polyphonic play. It is therefore mostly a horizontal music. No concrete sounds were used.

Recording of Antero Honkanen's Tapporaha.

Recording of Denis Lorrain's L'Angélus. This piece is of a fairly free design and naturally exploits passages of contrast or homogeneity between the tape and clarinet. The tape is composed of electronic and concrete sounds, including sounds from the clarinet itself. The development on two channels of the tape is opposed to the fixity of the interpreter situated between the two speakers. In a live presentation, this piece tries to avoid clearly marking its chronological limits: the beginning is designed to merge with the applause following a previously performed piece, and one avoids a precise ending by making one final clarinet sound on the speakers after the exit of the clarinetist.

Recording of Horacio Vaggione's La maquina de cantar.

Recording of Michael Christopher's Mithril Canticles. This piece is a heavily edited work utilizing two opposing sound ideas. One is "noise-oriented" sound achieved through fast sequential activity processed by ring modulating the reverb. This activity is opposed to the three-to-five note tune which permeates the work.

Recording of Peter Tod Lewis's Signal Messe. "Signal-messe" is an attempt to make a single coherent "bi-sensory" experience from two independent media expressions. The "performers" were the creators, having long since stored their improvisations on magnetic tape or film. The "mess" of stored "signals" was severely cut, edited, processed, mixed, according to a structure that seemed to be dictated by the material itself (though, naturally, in light of subjective considerations). The structure continued to emerge when the two elements, tape and film, were presented together. It was evident they had much in common: the film seemed, incredibly, a visual analogy of the music, their internal rhythms identical. It remained simply to synchronize the two to match certain salient audio features with video ones. The film is a movie of various video patterns produced largely through video feedback of a black and white system and then converted to color by a video color quantized, a unique device which allows the operator to assign virtually any color to any value in the video grey scale. The film provides a window (a “space gate?”) into a fantastic color world that just might be the same aesthetic realm as that of the sound.

Recording of Nicole Lachartre's Mordre la terre vivante. This work gives an example of the possibilities of compositional logic offered to composers working at the Belgrade studio. In the first part, a large number of quasi-linear pathways intertwine to create a semi-fluid mass, almost even amorphous at times. It is followed by a section worked in dynamic profile sculpted with precision and contrasts of rhythmic formulas are introduced sometimes by a large variety of instruments including various percussion instruments over which hovers an almost classic “solo” voice. Then the strict rhythmic formulas are temporarily destroyed by an aggressive material introduced in printing whose heights and durations were stochastically determined.

The specified pitches are made to generate their own accompanying frequencies, generally inharmonic with respect to the pitches themselves, as a result of FM or AM procedures. Each interval, or, in fact, each pitch-pair (or if you don't want to limit yourself to the chromatic scale, each pair of arbitrarily decided upon frequencies) can generate several possible spectra, but the similarity in sound quality between kinds of spectra quickly reduces to a limited number of readily manageable families of chord-types. These chords are the basis for a variety of musically interesting relationships, and this work represents but one of many possible developments of these kinds of sounds. The clarinetist in this recording is Philip Rehfeldt.

Recording of Iván Székely's For Alrun I et II. The work entitled "For Alrun" was composed in 1975 in Bayreuth during a live electronics course. The singing part of the play of about 7 minutes, a form and a light local broadcast, contains the popular song tchango beginning with the words "Gyere ki te gyšngyvirag" / come, leave my beautiful, my lily of the valley / - this one will have to be changed to all the presentations in Hungarian. This task was undertaken at the world premiere by Alrun Zahoransky - hence the title of the work. The player applying the electronics, especially from the point of view of the instrumentation, produces sounds and manipulates the electronic sounds and the human voice. The piece does not require studio work, each tone or voice sounds in vivo (i.e. each presentation, each show is new). The focus is on the psychic process of the piece and not on the technical process; its different degrees of difficulty adapt to the possibilities of the presentation. The singer is Ágnes Zsigmondi. The translation of the song is: Come, leave my beautiful, my lily of the valley, Because the moon is mounted, alas. I will …

Recording of Hildegard Westerkamp's Whisper Study (for two electroacoustic sound tracks). Whisper Study is based on the sentence "When there is no sound, hearing is most alert" (a quote from the Indian mystic Kirpal Singh. Except for the distant horns, all sounds were derived from the composer's voice, whispering the above sentence and the word "silence." Whisper Study started out as an exercise in exploring basic tape techniques in the analog studio of the 70s and using the whispered voice as sound material. Eventually, it became a piece about silence, aural perception and acoustic imagination. Whisper Study explores the place or moment where sound ends and its image begins. The poem "When There is No Sound" by Norbert Ruebstaat was written in direct response to the original version of Whisper Study. The poem in this version is spoken by the composer inside a soundscape of icicles and footsteps in snow, which originally was created for her radio series Soundwalking on Vancouver Co-operative Radio in 1978/79. Eventually this section was mixed with the last part of the original version of Whisper Study.

Recording of David Keane's Ambulator Nemorensis. "Ambulator Nemorensis" was put together as a preliminary study for an experimental film by Nicholas Kendall called Tala. While the actual music used in Tala was quite different from “Ambulator Nemorensis” both are attempts to create an imaginary landscape (or to use Murray Schaefer's term "soundscape"). This piece is an honest attempt to create something beautiful.

Recording of Bohdan Mazurek's Childish Dreams. These “Childish Dreams” were written from an idea suggested to me by Jadwiga Mackiewicz and on an order I contracted with the Polish Radio’s Programme. It was the ambition both of the composer that the work should have more than a musical value; that is should possess a visible didactic function. It has been our assumption that electronic music can attract a child’s attention and direct it toward the beauty of the sound world which surrounds him throughout every day: the specific attractiveness, the sound of machines, nature, the street. In making a child susceptible to this specific beauty of sound, his sensual world and his feeling for beauty are enriched. “Childish Dreams” are my first step in such matters. In effect, it is a group of five short works with clearly defined content and titles: Lullaby, Train, In the Land of Ice, Dance of the Cats, Clock Talk. The sound material climate, the manner of the musical narration and the sound material I employed in the various parts correspond with the theme of each sound tale, each “dream,” to a great or smaller extent. Though the music carries programme-type features, I feel I …

Recording of Reynold Weidenaar's Drive. Its glow is soft - silver. It becomes denser - and as the stuff of which it's made grows closer, it becomes harder and harder to keep it round, shining, glowing. Fatigue builds. Will is not enough. Finally, the question of why enters and the blows weaken, are fewer. The center holds itself for a while. To fail means death. The center then comes apart. Bursting or oozing. Back again to the periphery. A counterattack is mustered by the powers of will. A new pounding. A second glowing. But then a greater final fatigue enters. It ends. There isn't anything left. Why is left unanswered, unheard. - Thaddeus Kostrubala, M.D.D, The Joy of Running

Recording of Marcelle Deschênes's Moll (opéra-lilliput pour 6 roches molles). An open composition, MOLL (“Soft”) is presented in its full version as an outdoor show and "plain-breath" in 60 beaches, known for: 1) mimes or dancers 2) mobile and sound decors, and floors with sound 3) wind, blast, white noise 4) acoustic instruments (vibrating air, percussion) 5) live electronic instruments 6) magnetic tape (concrete sounds not transformed: insects, water, birds, boat, etc.) electronic sounds, musical quotes (Debussy, Berg, Wagner, Mozart etc.), manipulated sounds 7) sounds of mouth (partial or total live transformation) 8) a child (toys of children). This piece serves as a large group of associations from different levels of human experience. Of a plural nature and structure, this piece constitutes a mosaic made up of the juxtaposition of polymorphic and heterogeneous elements borrowed from models and systems of formation and transformation (cosmogonic, mythological, symbolic, atmospheric, oceanographic, astronomical, geological, musical, etc.) which, by association, can be put in relation with the rocks and their environment.

Recording of Benno Ammann's Mouvements. Realized at the Ipem Studio in November 1976. Two main structures, computer-controlled (and partly alienated and distorted), form the basic material of the piece, and are mixed, varied and transformed into new sound formations in an aleatoric process by means of high-low filters, tempophones and feedback subjected to variable time. Contrasting sound elements (more figurative characters), produced on the apparatuses DATAPULSE and WAVETEK of Ipem’s studio, accompany the main sections parties principally by variation and increasing movement in ever changing time.

Recording of Jean Piché's Prélude pour fête foraine et synthétiseur. This piece is an exploration of the acoustic structure of a popular festival. The environmental sections of the work come from a binaural recording of a celebratory crowd gathered for the annual parade, Carnival of Quebec City. The moments preserved are those preceding the arrival of the parade. The core of the piece was made in the studio with a MOOG synthesizer, using the temporal structure of the environment as a support. The electronic section passes from a slow, static time (reference to the acoustic macrostructure of a crowd - many internal changes but temporal homogeneity overall) to a fast time where the junction is established with the micro structure of the environment. The electronic synthesis of this last moment wants to approach the organic timbres of the voice and the horns that the party-goers use to sound their loud exuberance.

Recording of Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen's "11 september." The text is from a document called "What is MIR?" which was sent out illegally in Chile in 1974 and from the appeal of MIR two years after the taking over by the junta, on September 11, 1975. A left-wing party, MIR stayed in Chile in order to contribute as efficiently as possible to the building of the opposition. Other sound material also includes sounds from a typewriter and a demonstration at Bastad, Sweden in September 1975 at a tennis match between Sweden and Chile with more than 4,000 participants. The text is taken in small excerpts from the document in Spanish, English, Swedish, Danish, French, Dutch, and Icelandic. The piece consists of three sections overlapping each other gradually, which shows the relationship between the spoken words and the immediate danger connected with that text. The first section "as a spontaneous statement," deals with the document at its direct background: the silence is broken, in spite of the danger connected with the writing, manifolding papers that criticize the politics and methods of the junta and discuss the strategy of the opposition. The second section deals with the document as a medium of discussion. At …