The series from which this work sample is drawn is intended to illustrate, through abstraction, the complexity that arises from the imperfection and subjectivity of memory. The composition, '3 3/4: Glockenspiel' will loop indefinitely, ever-changing in subtle ways, though never repeating verbatim. This is meant to elicit in the viewer both familiarity with the musical gestures and the recognition that these gestures continually interact dynamically. The presence of both tape noise and digital artifacts indicate that the media utilized to create this work have changed the original performance in both obvious and ambiguous ways.
Inspired by the recognition that each of the standard tape speeds for legacy recording equipment represent either a doubling or halving of the adjacent speeds, this work was undertaken by recording a brief musical gesture to tape and then playing it back at both its original speed in addition to the other available speeds. Each modulation corresponds to transposition of the music in octaves; these transpositions are presented as an ensemble, each channel corresponding to an element of the visual presentation. The title of each piece refers to the original tape speed and musical instrument recorded.
In the first example, '3 3/4: Glockenspiel', this was done in the analog domain, playing back the tape at each speed setting, with an additional step of digital retiming in Ableton Live. In the second work example, '3 3/4: Electric Guitar', this transposition was done digitally, in real-time, through the use of MaxMSP. The corresponding visual presentation of each example was generated dynamically by the multichannel output of these processes via Jitter objects within MaxMSP.