8 - Text-Sound Composition

Text-Sound Composition

This week's composition is based on my personal favourite of the Avant Garde artists - Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The guidelines were:

• Chose a text
• record it
• produce a piece using only the recorded text as the sonic material
• no samples
• text must be intelligible
• The nature of the piece must reflect the meaning in the text

Gesang der Jünglinge as an influence.

The piece is based around the concepts of Stockhausen's Gesang Der Junglinge. 

"In Gesang, Stockhausen has used eleven of the verses sung by the youths, presented in a far from straightforward setting. Much is swallowed up in the roar of Stockhausen’s electronic fire, but the opening words of each verse, “Preiset den Herrn” (“Praise ye the Lord”), can be heard recurring throughout the composition as a kind of refrain and, on a less audible level, as an element that unifies sections" (Smalley, J. 2000)

"Because comprehension of Gesang’s text, at least at certain times, is important for the meaning of the piece to be grasped, Stockhausen attempts to control this aspect as well. To this end, he developed a qualitative scale of comprehensibility, ranging from 1 (incomprehensible) to 7 ( the most comprehensible). Although these values are also subjected to permutations (the first minute of Gesang’s music cycles through all seven degrees), there is at least one time in the piece where the words are presented clearly in their original order" (Smalley, J. 2000)

Choice of text

I had spent a while trying out a few different pieces of text to use as the source. I had toyed with excerpts from William Shakespeare's "Macbeth", Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat" and Bret Easton Eliis' "American Psycho". These all had a dark feel to them but I was struggling with interpreting their texts into suitable sounds. I eventually opted to use an excerpt from the "Bill Nye / Ken Ham" debate from February 2014. The part i chose was where Bill Nye describes the discovery of the echoes of the Big Bang.

Warping choice piece of text

I decided to leave the beginning of the text as it was. I eventually only modified two words out of the entire excerpt. The words in question were "hiss" and "bang".

The word "hiss" was put into Cecilia and stretch to evolve into white noise that would filter over time to add a long progression to the piece.

The word "Bang" was put into Soundgrain to add a looping, rumbling and undulating noise. I originally tried to recreate something along the lines of the "Croupier: Messieurs, Dames, rien ne va plus!" section from Karlheinz Stockhausen's Hymnen Region IV but Soundgrain did not prove powerful enough to be able to create the amount of layers required (and time constraints prevented me from being able to work on that single sound for the same length of time the Stockhausen was able to).

The final sound at the end of the piece is a variation of the Soundgrain modifications to the world "Bang".

Snapshot of "hiss" within Cecilia

Snapshot of "bang" within Soundgrain

The rest of the recorded text was overlaid on top of the newly added sounds. Certain words and phrases would trigger other sounds to start, such as "there was this echo" triggering the undulating noise.

Big Bang

The piece is named "Big Bang" for reasons that should be obviously apparent when listening to the piece.

References

Smalley, J, 2000. Gesang der Jünglinge: History and Analysis. USA: Columbia University.