II Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music

Canela - RS, Brazil
29/July - 01/August 1995

CD Program Notes

Electrocañas I

Carlos Cerana (B flat clarinet; programing)
Diego Losa (alto sax)
1995

Electrocañas I (in English, Electroreeds I) is the first result of a project exploring the interaction between reed instruments and digital media. Resources include sounds of live instruments, their digital processing, and control of electronic sounds by means of pitch-to-MIDI conversion and Max processing. The piece is generated from a melodic cell, which appears both in written parts and in improvised solos. A second section introduces electronics and transformation of sound.

Equipment used: Boss SE-50 digital sound processor, Yamaha TG-77 synthesiser, Richsound pitch-to-MIDI converter, Roland pedals (expressive and switch), and Macintosh Powerbook running Max.

Carlos Cerana was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1958. He studied clarinet with Néstor Tomassini and composition and electroacoustics with Francisco KrÖpfl. He taught at the National Conservatory and at the Municipal Conservatory of Buenos Aires. In 1988 he was appointed as a researcher at the Laboratorio de Investigación y Producción Musical (LIPM) in Buenos Aires. In 1992 he was invited to work at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts of the University of California in San Diego (CRCA) and at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University (CCRMA), as part of an exchange programme supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1994 he participated in a concert tour visiting several universities in the United States and Canada. His piece Fall was awarded the prize for electroacoustic composition by the National Endowment for the Arts of Argentina. Cerana received a scholarship from the Antor! chas Foundation and is presently researching electroacoustic music performance with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a member of the Argentine Federation of Electroacoustic Music (FARME) and of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA).

Diego Losa was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1962. He studied traverse flute with Bruno Bragato, Alfredo Ianelli and Pablo Levin, sax with Gustavo Dinerstein and harmony with Julio Viera. He is an active performer in the popular music field, and is presently a member of the Bandgap jazz band. He is also a sound engineer at the LIPM, where he teaches courses on equalization and mixing techniques. Losa participates in musical research with electroacoustic media. He has premiered several pieces for sax and electronics and has shared projects with visiting composers from the USA, as part of an exchange program with LIPM supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Piece of Mind

Celso Aguiar
1995

The title of the piece is a word play on two homophonous words in the English language ("piece" and "peace") and stands as a reaction to the different ways we face fun and pleasure. Exploring the concept "Fun is dangerous" (which Aguiar was told once in the USA), Piece of Mind is about the violence of fun or the fun of violence, at a more extreme level than is normally encountered in everyday life.

The piece can also be seen to operate as a continuum between two sound processing techniques in a blend of musique concrète and powerful spectral modelling synthesis. Julius Smith predicted that time domain techniques (such as sampling and granular synthesis) will be absorbed into frequency domain techniques (such as spectral modelling). This idea has evolved using particular but complementary resources from each technique to benefit the musical discourse.

In 1994, Aguiar worked with Xavier Serra at CCRMA to recreate an IFFT algorithm for additive synthesis. Some of the instruments used in the piece were created in this way. The piece was composed using the Lisp tools CLM and Common Music on the NeXT computer at CCRMA, Stanford University.

Celso Aguiar was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1957 and grew up in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. He began his musical studies with Swiss-Brazilian composer Ernst Widmer at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Since then he became particularly interested in electroacoustic music and in consequence developed a project at UFBA to construct his own computer-controlled digital synthesiser. He has written music for traditional instruments as well as electroacustic means and his main approach in this area has been the application of new digital signal processing techniques to composition. With these objectives in mind he is currently studying for a Doctorate in Composition at Stanford University.

Figuras Flamencas

Mario Verandi
1995

The source material for this piece includes samples from Spanish flamenco music and texts by Latin-American writer F.G. Lorca. Verandi used several sound manipulation techniques (for example, shuffling and time stretching) to create a surreal sound world from the flamenco music world. The musical discourse flows as a sequence of superimposed and juxtaposed transformations and confrontations between the flamenco world and the surreal world; Lorca's texts serve as a scaffolding-like structure to establish the relation between these two worlds. In this piece the intention is to evoke a metaphorical journey across a flamenco dreamland which is corrupted by surreal sonic creatures.

The piece was composed from December 1994 to March 1995 at Birmingham University, in England. The main software used in the composition were GRM tools, Sound Designer and Pro-Tools on the Macintosh computer. Figuras Flamencas belongs to a larger piece which Verandi is currently composing.

Mario Verandi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied Computer Science at the University of Belgrano and Music at Rosario University. In 1989 he went on to study in Barcelona at the Joan Miro Foundation's Phonos Laboratory.

He is currently pursuing an MMus in Composition at Birmingham University, England, under the supervision of Jonty Harrison. He is particularly interested in multimedia projects and has composed music for art installations, dance, video and theatre. His work has been broadcast, performed and recorded in Europe and the USA.

Bat out of Hell

Stephen Travis Pope (GEMA)
1983

Bat out of Hell is computer-generated tape music for ballet. It is envisaged as a solo percussion piece for a virtuoso with 168 microtonally-tuned bells. The two short sections of the work are intended to evoke certain gestures and shadows in dancers, who act out the entry into a ritual place for the passion of fear. Bat out of Hell was realised at the CMRS studio in Salzburg using the ARA LISP programs to generate Music11 notelists for the bell sounds. The composition works with a small number of elements which are reflected by various mirrors within the score. The low-pitched bells are simply the sighs, breath, and heartbeat of the performer.

Stephen Travis Pope was born in the USA in 1955. He studied Electrical Engineering at Cornell University, and Music Theory and Composition at the Vienna Music Academy and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. During his 15-year involvement with computer music, he has moved between academia and industry several times, and is now active as a software consultant through The Nomad Group and a research associate at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California in Berkeley. He has been an officer of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA) and was elected a lifetime member in 1990. He is editor of Computer Music Journal, now in its 19th year, published by the MIT Press. He has realised his works at several studios in the USA and Europe and has published widely in the fields of Computer Music, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interfaces, and Object-Oriented Programming.

Pericón

Conrado Silva
1989

This piece is composed of variations on a well known folk tune from Uruguay, called Pericón. Silva selected four short excerpts of this tune (each only a couple of bars long) and transformed them using several musical variation techniques (for example, dynamic amplification and note permutation) with the addition of contrasting musical passages and thematic distortion. The piece works as a kind of real-time improvisation, where the computer controls three synthesisers in response to Silva's keyboard improvisation. In his Pericón, Silva attempts to achieve a readily identifiable listening environment, by using well known tunes imbued with some mocking sound colours.

Conrado Silva was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1940 but has lived in Brazil since 1970. He studied both Music and Engineering at Montevideo, Munich and Berlin. Silva is one of the most influential leaders of the contemporary music scene in Latin America: he created the Latin-American Courses for Contemporary Music, taking place from 1971 to 1989 in different Latin-American countries. He was also one of the founders of the Festival Música Nova of São Paulo. He currently teaches Composition and Musical Acoustics at University of Brasilia and is a member of the newly created Brazilian Society for Electroacoustic Music. He has composed many pieces for voice, instruments and electronic devices, including: Music for 10 portable radios (1964), Marat-Sade (1966), Compulsion Hombrehistorica (1970), Parasexteto (1971), Polaris (1977), Natal Del Rey (1978) and the acclaimed electronic chamber opera Espaços Hab! itados (1994).

Olivine Trees

Eduardo Reck Miranda
1994

Olivine Trees is perhaps the first piece of electroacoustic music ever composed using a high-performance parallel computer. The piece is specifically composed using sounds synthesised by Chaosynth on the Connection Machine CM-200 computer. Chaosynth is a sound synthesis system developed by Miranda at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), in Scotland. The synthesis technique of Chaosynth is inspired by the granular synthesis technique; it functions by generating a large amount of short sonic events, or particles, in order to form larger, complex sound events. It produces a wide range of bubbling sounds in various flow speeds and tone colours; most sounds resemble the morphology of the sounds of flowing water.

Olivine Trees is inspired by Van Gogh's painting, "Olive Trees". The varied and individually identifiable brush strokes of this painting inspired the composition of the sounds of the piece; in direct correlation, colour relates to timbre and length of brush stroke relates to the duration of individual, "granular" sounds. Other signal processing techniques, such as convolution, were also used during the mixing process at the University of Edinburgh's electroacoustic music studio.

Eduardo Reck Miranda was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1963. He graduated in Data Processing Technology at Vale do Rio dos Sinos University (UNISINOS), São Leopoldo, Brazil, in 1985 and went on to study Philosophy at the Pontificial Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS) and Music at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. From 1986 to 1990 he attended several electroacoustic and experimental music courses in South America, including the renowned Latin-American Courses for Contemporary Music in 1989. In 1991 he gained a Master degree in Music Technology (MSc) at the University of York, England. In 1992 he also studied computer music at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1995 he was awarded a PhD in Music and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Academic publications include research papers in major international journals, including Computer Music Journal, Interface, Leonardo and Contemporary Music Review. Latest music compositions include Italo Calvino takes Jorge Borges on a taxi journey in Berlin (electroacoustics on tape), Entre l'absurde et le mystère (chamber orchestra), Noises (electroacoustics on tape), The Turning of the Tide (electroacoustics on tape and prepared violin) and Mônadas (percussion ensemble). His piece Electroacoustic Samba II was recently awarded a Le Puy prize at Bourges, France. He is one of the creators of NUCOM (the Computer Music Commission of SBC - the Computer Science Society of Brazil).

Pyrócua

Ralf Ollertz
1994

Pyrócua is inspired by a poem by Toula Limnaios. It was composed at the electroacoustic music studios of Folkwang School of Music (ICEM) in Essen, Germany. The basic material of the piece are sounds sampled from three traditional acoustic musical instruments: piano, flute and violin. Ollertz also used samples of the sounds produced by a waterheater. Equipment used include Digidesign's Sound Designer and Pro Tools on the Macintosh computer, a sampler Akai S1000 and a Lexicon 480L.

Ralf Ollertz was born in MÖnchengladbach, Germany, in 1964. He studied composition, electronic music and conducting with Vivienne Olive, Wilfried Jentzsch and Werner Andreas Albert at the Meistersinger Conservatory in Nürnberg. He also studied composition with Günther Becker at the Robert Schumann School of Music in Düsseldorf.

After a scholarship in Italy, where he studied composition with Salvatore Sciarrino, he studied for a Master's degree in Electronic Music and studied conducting with Armin Klaes and Peter EÖtvÖsz at the Folkwang School of Music in Essen. Since 1994 Ollertz has studied dance and choreographic composition with Jean Cebron. He has worked recently with artists, including Bettina Elmpt, Jens Kaul, Clarence Barlow and Hartmut Geerken.

In addition to instrumental and electronic music he has realised many interactive installations, radioplays, music-choreographies and music for dance and theatre. He is the director of go ahead an ensemble for new music, and the musical director of the Claudia Lichtblau Dance Company.

Noite

Victor Lazzarini
1995

This piece is a setting of some fragments of poetry by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, from the book Ficções do Interlúdio III, Poemas de Álvaro de Campos. The text consists of imagery associated with the night:

Na noite terrível, substância natural de todas as noites
Na noite de insônia, substância natural de todas as minhas noites
Noite igual por dentro ao silêncio, noite
Com as estrelas lantejoulas rápidas
No teu vestido franjado de infinito
Nesta noite em que não durmo e o sossêgo me cerca
Como uma verdade de que não partilho
e lá fora o luar, como a esperança que não tenho, é invisível
pr'a mim.

The piece has a straightforward structure (according to Lazzarini) based on the three stanze of the text, which constitute well-defined blocks, followed by musical commentaries. The whole piece works as a diminuendo, starting from a dramatic setting of the first verses and ending with the serenity of the last words being whispered.

Noite was composed at the University of Nottingham's electroacoustic music studio, in England. It was fully produced on the PC486 DX2 computer running the Composer's Desktop Project (CDP) software. Most of the sounds were sourced from readings of the text, eventually processed using Mark Dolson's Phase Vocoder and Trevor Wishart's spectral manipulation software. Other sounds were synthesised using the Csound synthesis package.

There is also a second version of this piece for tape, live electronics and orchestra. It integrates a larger work, Magnificat.

Victor Lazzarini was born in Londrina, Brazil, in 1969. He began his musical studies at the local conservatory, where he learned music theory and piano. He went on to study composition with Almeida Prado and Damiano Cozzella at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). In 1993 he received a scholarship to pursue a post-graduate degree at the University of Nottingham, under the supervision of Nicholas Sackman.

/cartas/rs95.car

Aluízio Arcela
1995

/cartas/rs95.car is a composition generated entirely by CARBON, a program for algorithmic composition developed by Arcela at University of Brasilia Computer Music Laboratory (LPE). Arcela regards this piece as a time tree theorem; CARBON processes the theorem and produces scores, which are interpreted by two other programs: SOM-A and ILUSOM (both developed at LPE). The former produces sounds whilst the later produces images. SOM-A is an additive synthesiser using 132 generators (or instrumentos ortoestereofônicos); it can produce sounds with up to 52 partials. ILUSOM is a program that produces a visual representation of the time tree threorem. /cartas/rs95.car was originally composed for live performance with violin, marimba, projected images and synthesised sounds.

Aluízio Arcela was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He attained his Doctorate in Computer Science at the Pontificial Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ) in 1984. In his thesis he devised a technique, time trees (árvores de tempo), to represent the inner structure of musical intervals. He also developed a series of software for sound synthesis and algorithmic composition based upon time trees (for example, SOM-A and CARBON). Arcela recently devised a technique to generate pictures from time tree representations of music intervals.

In 1989 Arcela created the Master Course in Computer Music at the University of Brasilia (UnB); the first ever University-level course on computer music in South America. He currently conducts research, teaches and directs LPE and also teaches at the Department of Visual Arts at the same university.

Saudades de Ouro Preto

Robert Willey (BMI)
1995

"Saudades de Ouro Preto" (Nostalgia for Ouro Preto) is a computer-mediated performance in the Max software environment, running on a Macintosh computer. It uses Max Mathew's idea of the "sequential drum", in which the computer plays the next note of a score each time a note on the keyboard is played. This implementation allows the performer to improvise at the keyboard rather than entering the score into the computer in advance. The recording was made with Sound Canvas (Roland), Morpheus (E-mu Systems), and Wavestation (Korg) synthesizers.

Robert Willey is a research associate at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), at the University of California in San Diego. For the last five years he has assisted a computer music exchange between CRCA, CCRMA (Stanford University), and LIPM (Buenos Aires). During that time he also supported the development of computer music in Brazil through participation in NUCOM, giving workshops and concerts at a number of universities, and posting information about Brazil on the world wide web.

Edited by Eduardo Reck Miranda and Bob Willey from information given by the authors.