The title of this piece translates from the Japanese as “Shadow Song”. This piece features the interaction between my live singing (overtones and multiphonics) and an instrument I built with a computer-programming environment for real-time interactivity called Max/MSP. The structure of the piece is a large-scale cross-fade between the live voice and the electronics. As the piece progresses, my vocal signal is feed into a buffer, which is spatialized quadraphonically, and manipulated with controllers which transform parameters such as the buffer size, the rate of reading through the buffer, rate of randomness reading within the buffer, etc. My aim in building the Max instrument was twofold: to create sounds which clearly evolve out of my vocal performance and to create sounds electronically which I could then mimic myself – a discourse in which, if the sounds were likened to shadows, it is unclear which are the shadows and which are the shadows of shadows.

MORE PROGRAM NOTES