Abstract:

The will to extrapolate from a piano a new spectral and spatial dimension drove me to the composition of " Come il batacchio della settima campana" [Like the clapper of the seventh bell]. It seemed to me very stimulating the idea of putting myself in front of an instrument so important for our musical tradition and using it to create, by computer ways, a new acoustic space. First step was to sample sounds from a piano, but I was interested in use of the tailpiece without using keyboard and hammers as a striker. I used a little bell without clapper to produce a series of samples, obtained scratching and striking chords or inside walls of harmonic box of a grand-piano. The consequent transformation of these samples is obtained through the Csound program by filtering, transposing, time stretching, overlapping, reverberating, spatializing, etc. The final mixing is realised with the audio-board software Triple-dat. I followed formal rule: 1) Source bondings: sound materials were elaborated to understand, o misunderstand, a relationship with the primal source; 2) Spatialization: allocation between channels and reverberation aim to create a variable and multiform acoustic space; Gesture: sound and its time development responds at movement and physical gestual expectations that are natural or artificial connected. Maybe a trip is the metaphor that represents the final result of this work; a trip inside the piano, intended as a place and physic space to explore and listen. To listen, which is just like filling an empty space. Who listens should recreate that hammers mechanism absent, absent ' like the clapper of the seventh bell'.