The Failure of Surface for piccolo and bass flute 2008
Davíð Brynjar Franzson
“The structure of the piece is derived from a recording of a local cafe in New York City. I analyzed a fragment of this recording and then trained an artificial intelligence agent to listen to the full recording based on how I heard it. This produced a mapping of events occurring in the recording into six categories
(image 2 shows the mapping, one category per measure). I then choose six arbitrary categories to translate this structure into a musical surface:
1) whispering sound – sounds that are similar to the chatter of persons passing by my window;
2) oscillating or wavering sounds;
3) attacks;
4) sustained high or low sounds;
5) a transcription of an IKEA kettle boiling;
6) harmonics.
These materials are misbalanced bydesign, where in some cases the categories are based upon the physical attributes of the sounds that end up belonging to the category, while other categories are based on how well the sounds belonging to the category can embody a sound taken from my local environment. Throughout the piece some of the categories take on an interfacing function, such as the attack category which triggers a cascaded repetition of the sounds that immediately precede it, or the transcription, which gradually becomes more and more dependent on the sounds that surround it, until at the middle of the piece, where the process is inverted and the sounds used for the transcription events in the second half of the piece are taken from the immediate neighborhood of the transcription event that are symmetrically located in the first half of the piece. The sounds belonging to each category – except for the kettle transcription which contains its own pitches – are tagged with two pitches selected from a spectral analysis of a gong like sound that my dog’s foodbowl makes when I accidentally kick it while rooting around in my kitchen (which usually leads to him running fast towards me in the hope that feeding time came early that day). This limits the pitch material of the piece to those ten pitches except for moments of stepwise motion and passages based around harmonics.”
