Conference program 41 International Computer Music Conference

Looking Back, Looking Forward
Denton, 09/25 – 10/01
world, dominated by the big hedge funds, has been turned on its heels. I set out to compose a piece that would metaphorically
acknowledge the trends rapidly shaping our new socioeconomic era. A Giffen Good is one that is consumed more as
its price rises. This situation occurs rarely, perhaps only theoretically, when (in economics terms) the income effect trumps
the substitution effect with respect to a change in purchasing power. Violating the traditional law of demand, few of these
goods have ever been found. The potatoes of the Great Irish Famine remain a classic example. Giffen goods retain an
inelastic demand even while its price rises along with other, substitute goods, because it is still a cheaper and necessary
alternative to goods whose prices (or opportunity costs) are rising more rapidly. Since the Great Recession of 2008, some
have suggested that this footnote in our economics textbooks has become a reality, the liquidity trap causing investors to
sell off shares of increasingly higher risk stocks in favor of buying low-risk, safer financial assets instead. Some scholars
are looking at more liquid assets, including oil and money itself, to search for the presence of Giffen goods in recent years.
Some have even suggested that gold, the ultimately liquid form of wealth, may be showing signs of Giffenness. Pictured is
a model of the price of gold from 2001 to 2014, where one can observe mostly steady increases, an effect of the woldwide
recession. If more investors are moving their assets into low risk, highly liquid assets, what will the consequences be years
from now at various levels of society? In the music, I’ve used this curve to generate durations corresponding to this trend
in the world gold market, deriving rhythms in the notated trombone part as a kind of talea against a color that generates
pitch material – in the form of a second order Markov chain that indexes an analysis of samples I prepared with trombonist
Brennan Johns at Indiana University. A similar Markov chain is implemented in the live performance; it indexes the performer
note-by-note as the piece progresses and generates score material from it. This kind of Markov process, once used to
predict the movements between bear, bull, and stagnant markets, echoes the presence of live gold stock data pinged from
Yahoo Finance during the course of the piece, whose fluxuations are magnified and heard throughout. How important are
these micro-movements in price? What will be their long term impact? Similar statistical methods have been adopted to
match audio descriptors such as mel frequency cepstrum coefficients. Audio analysis / resynthesis methods pervade the
structure of the piece and its texture.
Ring | Axle | Gear: This video triptych explores 3 shapes: ring, axle (line), and gear, accompanied by sound design encompassing
a wide range of synthesized and real world sounds, investigating aesthetic implications of the fetishization of icons
and symbols.
blue, ballade, blow brought together—after a lengthy disconnection—my two dominant musical realities: electroacoustic studio
composition, and improvised piano performance. As the title suggests, the piece resonates with three improvisatory
approaches commonly associated with jazz: blues; the jazz ballad; and free jazz or musique actuelle ‘blowing’. The pianist
improvises all live elements in real-time, freely drawing from—or ignoring—materials in the fixed electroacoustic component.
‘blue, ballade, blow’ was premiered in Birmingham, UK in 2005, in BEAST’s JazzElectro, with the composer as pianist.
stringstrung, for guitar and digital media, was commissioned by and is dedicated to my dear friend, John Doe. The digital
audio is entirely derived from acoustic guitar samples.The work is loosely inspired by the strings of a guitar and the last
stanza of “87” by E.E. Cummings:
what a wonderful thing
is the end of a string
(murmurs little you-i
as the hill becomes nil)
and will somebody tell
me why people let go
- E.E. Cummings
© Grove Weidenfeld»
illusionOfSpace attempts to unify sonic material drawn from recordings of the environment and of the spoken voice. They are
shaped by similar gestural trajectories and spatial profiles. They often adopt characteristics of the other. The work is meant
to evoke distorted and/or surreal sonic landscapes that mimic (albeit in stereo) the spatial depth and richness of natural
sound (environment), framed by a more traditional (human) musical discourse in the voice.
Hypochondriasis is my first experimental work for electronic music. Chin is an ancient Chinese traditional 7-string zither, which
is also a very personal instrument due to its soft volume and subtle timbral changes. Since it is not able to make sounds
of great volume, amplification becomes an important element and thus creates a new kind of environment, an augmented
chin. Such an augmented environment gives me inspiration for the piece. The necessary amplification and the electronic
sounds both expand and even exaggerate the original instrumental sounds, which reminds me of the syndrome of the hypochondriasis,
a tendency to fear or imagine that one has the illnesses that one does not actually have. The sufferers of this
psychological illness normally augment their pain and exaggerate their physical conditions. In the piece, I pretend to be a
hypochondriasis sufferer who exaggerates and distorts the sense as if viewing things under the microscope or doing some
ritual. By associating this emotional activity with music, I intend to find an appropriate role that the electronics plays, to build
an intimate relationship between acoustics, amplification, and electronics, and to create different scenarios and multiple
layers of musical environments. This piece is dedicated to my mother, who had a hard time taking care of my father, a hypochondriasis
sufferer. It is also dedicated to some activists in my country. To me, they are the hypochondriasis sufferers who
have foreseen the crises hidden in the current situation and are fighting hard for the well-being of the country.
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