Electronic

Pieces of Home (2024)

First performed at the Technosonics Festival at the University of Virginia, October 2024

This piece explores different ways of hearing everyday home sounds. I use various techniques to create a compelling sound bath; my source sounds are found in various recordings I made at home of things such as water, pantry grains, bowls, and stainless steel water bottles. In addition, I designed a simple instrument in Max/MSP that I can play using my computer keyboard. This instrument uses pitch-adjusted material from the recorded sounds as notes so that I can improvise over the textures that evolve. My hope with this piece is for you to hear everyday, mundane things in completely new and unexpected ways, and thereby develop a greater appreciation for objects and processes that many of us may take for granted.

Rings of Memory (2024)

First performed at Digitalis at the University of Virginia, April 2024

Rings of Memory explores different ways of conceptualizing time, using the rings of a tree as thematic material. The rings are concentric, suggesting a way of looking at time that differs from the conventional tendency to think of it as progressing from left to right along a straight line. The piece opens with a long melody representing the tree's life; the melody is made up of smaller units, each representing an individual year. After the full melody is heard, the piece explores the tree's life as a collection of layered melodies. Although time progresses linearly, the tree rings accumulate concentrically. The individual melodies are grouped into sets as a way to organize the tree's life into discrete multi-year units. The exploration of the tree's music begins with its innermost set of rings and slowly adds each successive set, creating a progressively rich texture of sounds that eventually come to encompass all of the time represented in the rings. As time progresses, the melodies of years past become quieter, but are still heard in the layered sound to represent the fact that the tree's life is comprised of all of its individual years and the memories that come with them. The image of the tree rings figures prominently in the performance; tracing around the rings with the computer mouse causes corresponding changes in panning around a multi-channel speaker system.

Jazz trio Max patch (2022)

This fixed media piece uses as its source material the live recording of a jazz piano trio that I wrote and performed in college. The original piece is titled “3.4.3” to reflect the meter of the different sections: it begins in a jazz waltz (in 3), then transitions into a quick swing tempo (fast 4), and returns to the jazz waltz at the end (again in 3). I wanted to experiment with audio signal processing, so I created a Max patch that applies randomly generated values between 0.9 and 0.99 to the playback speed to create a “pitch bend” effect. My goal was to create a piece that maintains enough of the original recording to be recognizable as such, but also has a distinct character due to the variations on the source material.