11.12.2011 \\ Domenica | CHIESA DI SANTA EULALIA (Istituto Cervantes), Via Argenteria Nuova 33, Palermo

4-channel spectral improvisation with Joel Cahen and Wajid Yaseen

These images document an emerging methodology for working with situated sound recordings (a term I prefer to field or environmental recording – perhaps photograph is preferable). I do not consider these digital files to point backwards in time towards some imagined documentation of a contingency typified by excess. They do present some trace of dynamical spectral activity. Such activity I understand to occur both in the frequency domain and also a mythical, haunted domain of lack, loss and absence.

The spectrograms, while found useful when dealing with many recordings of various duration, are of course an abstraction of the sound itself – they do however present, by this very abstraction, a playful means of re-rendering the recorded sound into something other.

This performance, as part of the Opensound project also suggested to me to explore a means of realtime 4 channel spatialisation using FLOSS tools. This performance was my first live experiment using a mashup of TouchOSC/PD/Ableton to move though an recombinatory 4 channel matrix of the spectral abstractions

http://www.ixem.it/

http://hexler.net/software/touchosc

http://puredata.info/