68th Street
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68th
Street is based on one single sound recording, made in spring of 1998
in New York City. I tried to catch the unique atmosphere of a NYC subway
station, especially these high, sinusoidal tones that occur when sliding
a metro card through the ticket machine and the following sounds of the
bouncing turnstile. During the afternoon rush hour, dozens of people enter
the station at the same time and "activate" many of these sound sources.
The formerly discrete and short-lasting elements merge and create a static,
almost meditative environment, a continuous soundscape: what happens very
fast, causes something quite slow. I especially like this situation because
the turnstiles are not exactly in tune, and thus the acoustic merging
of several machines leads to audible beatings, dynamic pulsations of close,
but slightly detuned frequencies. |
| I
chose a five minute-long sequence from the above described sound recording,
and developed a pyramid-like structure through
filtering, transposing and overlapping of the material . The piece begins
with a very low transposition of the recording, higher variations are
added one after another, until the original version is reached. The (almost)
unchanged original recording dominates the middle section of the piece,
but then the descent starts again, and the composition fades out with
its beginning sequence. |
| ..68th Street was awarded at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2000) and premiered at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin, September 1st, 2000. |
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Selected
presentations: |
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