Auditorio, Centro Atico
Universidad Javeriana
Septiembre 5, 2013 :: 7:00PM
Bogotá
CENTRO ATICO
Calle 40 No. 6-39
Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá
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Ivan Tcherepnine, who was present at the premiere in Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University on May 1972, wrote the following notes in 1973 for a concert at Harvard University. Leland Smith s program Score was used to create the input data for the composer s spatial and synthesis algorithms. In 2009 Bill Schottstaedt (CCRMA) created a program that allowed this version of Turenas to be recomputed to meet current audio standards.
This computer generated tape composition makes extensive use of two major developments in computer music pioneered and developed by John Chowning, working at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab. The first involves the synthesis of moving sound sources in a 360-degree sound space, which takes into account the effects of the Doppler shift. The second was a breakthrough in the synthesis of "natural" (as well as almost "supernatural") timbres in a simple but elegant way, using accurately controlled frequency modulation. This is the technical background, but the piece is not about that background. The title "Turenas" is an anagram of "Natures", evoking the way sounds "tour" through the space, transparent and pure, produced by the most technologically sophisticated means yet tending to sound perfectly natural, as if a dream could come true.
- Ivan Tcherepnine (1943-1998)
The sounds in Phoné (from the Greek, meaning "sound" or "voice") were produced using a special configuration of the frequency modulation (FM) synthesis technique that allows the composer to simulate a wide range of timbres including the singing voice and other strongly resonant sounds. The synthesis programs are designed to permit exploration of and control over the ambiguities that can arise in the perception and identification of sound sources. The interpolation between timbres and extension of "real" vocal timbres into registers that could not exist in the real world such as a basso profundissimo" and the micro-structural control of sound that determines the perceptual fusion and segregation of spectral components are important points in this composition.
The composer developed this technique of FM synthesis of the singing voice at IRCAM, Paris in 1979 using a DEC PDP-10 and realized the piece at CCRMA in 1980 81, using the Samson Box, a real-time digital synthesizer designed by Peter Samson. The work was premiered at IRCAM in Paris in February 1981.
Chowning received one of IRCAM's first commissions from Luciano Berio for the institute's first major concert series presented by Pierre Boulez, Perspectives of the 20th Century, given in Paris in 1977. Stria was conceived beginning in 1973 and realized during the summer-autumn of 1977 at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and premiered October 13, 1977.
The work is based on the unique possibilities in computer synthesis of precise control over the spectral components or partials of a sound. Most of the music we hear is composed of sounds whose partials are harmonic or in the harmonic series. In STRIA, a non-tonal division of the frequency space is based on a ratio that is also used to create spectra whose partials are inharmonic. The ratio is that of the Golden Section (or Golden Ratio) from antiquity, 1.618, which in this unusual application yields a certain transparency and order in what would normally be considered "clangorous" sounds. The composition of the work was dependent upon computer program procedures, specially structured to realize the complementary relationship between pitch space (approximately 13 notes/octave) and spectral space (timbre). In addition, these procedures are at times recursive allowing musical events that they describe to include themselves in miniature form as in the fractal geometries of Mandelbrot.
Voices is a play of imagination evoking the Pythia of Delphi and the mystifying effects of her oracular utterances. For nearly a thousand years, the oracle held a place of prominence in the history and culture of ancient Greece always a women whose roots, some scholars believe, are found in the cult of Gaia, the Earth Mother, followed by a succession of goddesses beginning with Themis, Phoebe and finally supplanted by the God Apollo, whose priestess was the Pythia. Her utterances were believed to be his voice in answer to questions that were posed to the Pythia by supplicants from all over the ancient world questions that ranged from the mundane to the portentous.
A single soprano engages a computer-simulated space with her voice. The computer allows us to project sounds at distances beyond the walls of the actual space in which we listen to create an illusory space. Her utterances launch synthesized sounds within this cavern-like space, sounds that conjure up bronze cauldrons, caves, and their animate inhabitants, sounds of the world of the Pythia modulated by our technology and fantasy but rooted in a past even more distant than her own - the Pythia s voice is the voice of Apollo.
Selected pitches of the soprano s voice are detected by the computer running a program written by the composer in MaxMSP, a powerful synthesis/processing programming language developed by Cycling '74. The soprano s voice is transmitted from a small head microphone to the computer where it is spatialized, mixed with synthesized sounds and then sent to the sound system in the auditorium. As each sung target pitch is detected, the program advances in search of the next. The overall pace of the composition, therefore, is determined by the soprano. The pitches are from a scale division of powers of the Golden Ratio as in stria, rather than the traditional division of powers of two (octaves). The partials of the synthesized sound, largely inharmonic, are composed to function, again as in stria, in the domains of pitch and harmony as well as timbre, an idea first conceived by John Pierce and brilliantly realized by Jean-Claude Risset in Mutations 1969.
Voices was commissioned by the Groupe de Recherche Musicale of the French radio and first performed in March 2005 in the Salle Messiaen. Version 2 was performed in March 2006 as part of the Berkeley Symphony series and version 3 was presented at the Tanglewood Music Festival in August 2011.
Maureen Chowning, soprano de coloratura, realizo estudios de música en el Conservatorio de la ciudad de Boston antes de trasladarse a la región de San Francisco en Estados Unidos. Recientemente ha aparecido en la serie de programas ``Nova'' en la televisión pública de EE.UU., además de presentaciones en el programa ``Smithsonian World'' con Max Mathews, demostrando aplicaciones del instrumento musical denominado como ``radio batuta''. También ha realizado conciertos en Canadá, Polonia, Japón y en el Festival Internacional de Música Electroacústica en Bourges, Francia. En este festival en 1990 estrenó las obra Evening del compositor Richard Boulanger y en 1997 la obra Sea Songs del compositor Dexter Morrill. En la celebración de los cincuenta años de la música por computador y como homenaje a Max Mathews, fue invitada a interpretar de nuevo la obra de Morrill y al estreno de la obra Three Spanish Songs de la compositora Joanne Carey, en el museo de la historia de la computación en California. Esta última obra también fue presentada con la compositora en conciertos en Polonia, Hong Kong, Vancouver y Mexico.
En Marzo del 2005 Maureen Chowning realizó el estreno mundial de Voices (version 1) para computador, sistemas interactivos y solo de soprano en la Maison de Radio Francia en París. Esta obra compuesta para ella, es un encargo del INA-GRM al compositor John Chowning. Al siguiente año en Marzo, llevó a cabo el estreno en EE.UU. de Voices (version 2), como parte de una serie de conciertos de la sinfónica de Berkeley. En el mismo año interpretó de nuevo esta misma obra con Oscura para computador y soprano del compositor Jean Claude Risset en Buenos Aires y Montevideo. Estas obras también fueron parte de conciertos en la Universidad de la Florida y en el San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. La obra Voices (version 3) fue interpretada en la Universidad de Washington en Abril del 2011, y desde entonces en la universidades de MIT, Brown, Eastman Rochester y Yale, como también en las ciudades de Beijing y Taipei.
Maureen Chowning sobresale por su habilidad en el canto utilizando afinaciones alternativas tales como la escala Pierce de trece intervalos. Su repertorio se expande desde obras como los oratorios de Handel y estelares como la Reina de la noche en la Flauta Mágica de Mozart, hasta repertorio contemporáneo incluyendo obras de Schoenberg, Babbitt, Qui Dong, Servio Marin y Atau Tanaka.
Inspirado en investigaciones sobre percepción acústica realizadas por Jean Claude Risset (también pionero del campo), Chowning crea un sistema para la aplicación de su descubrimiento, utilizando el desarrollo del timbre en contextos de composición y que a la postre representaría gran valor musical. En 1973 bajo su recomendación la Universidad de Stanford da licencia de la patente de la síntesis FM al fabricante japonés de instrumentos musicales Yamaha, con lo que este método se convierte en uno de los motores de síntesis de audio más exitosos en la historia de los instrumentos musicales electrónicos.
Junto con James (Andy) Moorer, John Grey y Loren Rush en 1975 John Chowning funda el Centro para investigación en acústica y música por computador (CCRMA) de la Universidad de Stanford, que hasta estos días es uno de los lugares más importantes en el entorno de la investigación en música por computador y temas relacionados.
Entre sus distinciones se encuentran: miembro de la American Academy of Arts and Sciences desde 1988. Doctor honorario en música de la Universidad de Wittenberg en 1990. En 1995 recibió el Diplôme d Officier dans l Ordre des Arts et Lettres del ministerio de la cultura de Francia. Doctor Honoris Causa de la Université de la Méditerranée en el 2002 y de la Queen's University en Belfast, Irlanda en el 2010.
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