Undivided, written for 3rd Order Ambisonics.. and featured in Tuesdays Post : Live Progressive Ambient concert in September 2022, at Iklectik, London.
An immersive piece about the distortion of natural language by public relations and advertising, ‘Bernase was the first person to take Freud’s ideas about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses, he showed American corporations for the first time how they could make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass produced goods to their unconscious desires’. The morphology of manipulation by public relations and advertising campaigns is, in my opinion, crystalised by the repeated use of Taglines. ‘a reiterated phrase identified with an individual, group, or product: SLOGAN’, normal everyday sentences that make you think of a product because of the sheer amount of repetition. Disrobing the sentence of its original sentiment. In Undivided, some words pop through the clouds of vocal sound, all of them belong to 7 taglines. The music is composed using my voice recording the phonetics present in the English language, the engines and articulators, vowels and consonants. All of the overt rhythms are derived from the rhythm of speech of these Taglines. I have 3 other ambisonic pieces concerned with mass media and manipulation, all referencing the tagline in various musical adaptations of each sentence’s syntax and phonology.
In some parts of the composition I investigate the inherent nature of the sound of a consonant, as in my treatment of the letter F at 4m19s. and W at 4m36s which appears to enter a more intimate, proximate or egocentric space. We can only discern accurate meaning if; a. the sounds uttered make patterns that we recognise as aural symbols or in semiological terms ‘signifiers’, for doing, naming, describing, categorising and connecting.and b. we have outside-time knowledge of and command over conventional syntax
Beginning with randomised phonetics using Maxmsp.
Chords using only the 5 note Indian Hindole (love, early dawn) scale G B C# E F#
I divided the vowels into starting with ee e a al o u
1st chordal (bar 13)repeats plain ee e a al o u on a random use of all 5 notes in the hindole scale. Playing with the inherent nature of the consonents
2nd chordal (bar 125) repeats e ee e / a ee a / al ee al /o ee o /u ee u
Stimulates harmonics and beating between slowly descending chords harmonics as move from vowels
3rd chordal (bar 183) starts with most dissonant 2 note chords to most consonant 2 note chords relations F# and G / C# and G / E. and F# / C# and B / G and E / G and B / F# and B / F# and C# / E and B / E and E Oct/ .
4th chordal section (bar 241) all on E with all the vowel variations gliding and static.
All the sounds in this piece are vocal apart from one long binaural sample of a Monochorde Table (Maman, n.d.)