Agostino Di Scipio: Sound & Fury II


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Artist Statement:


    Sound & Fury is the title of a whole “class of compositions”. Each piece has properties similar to all the other pieces in the class, but it also reveals individual features at every single public appearance.The concert performance features at least to levels of interaction: musician/computer and computer/environment (via controlled acoustical feedback). The details and the general layout of the music are experienced as emergent phenomena brought forth by the dynamical system constituted by these interactions. All sounds in Sound & Fury are generated in real-time with a fairly peculiar sound synthesis technique devised by the composer, functional iteration synthesis. This is a method of “nonstandard” digital synthesis of sound, i.e. a method which abstracts from known acoustical models (and especially from the Fourier acoustical paradigm). “Nonstandard” approaches to sound synthesis represent an area of research unique to computer music (among the pioneers in nonstandard synthesis of sound are I. Xenakis and G.M. Koenig). Functional iteration synthesis is modeled after the mathematics of “chaos theory”. However, Sound & Fury utilizes such mathematical models not only for the generation of sound, but for the generation of the musical structure itself, as it unfolds in real time. Every performance reveals paths and trajectories of sound of its own, due to different starting parameters set up by the performer. In this way, every performance reflects-in its timbres and textures, in the timing of its pace and rhythm-the notion of “temporal horizon”, the “long-term unpredictability” of events (popularly known as “the butterfly effect” ), a common feature of dynamical systems-not only natural systems, but also social and cultural systems. And the unpredictability, as WI, of our experiences and life. (Hence the title, drawn from Shakespeare’s The Tempest).

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