for soprano, flute, clarinet, trombone, Fender Rhodes, percussion, and electronics.

Excess Study #1 explores the generative potential of non-functional audio. This piece is constructed using materials that are extracted from samples of commercial music that don’t serve a traditional musical function: amp hum, the starting/stopping of tape machines, audience chatter, musician banter, applause, and more. These excess sounds are removed from their original context and reconstructed into uncanny sonic forms.

written for and performed by Fonema Consort in 2022

Excess Study #1

Phenomenon #1 uses 4 soprano saxophones as a composite mechanism for directly activating the human hearing apparatus. The saxophone material was recorded and processed through a collection of corrupted audio codecs. The process for corrupting these codecs severely mangles the psychoacoustic algorithms embedded within each codec. When these codecs process audio that contain explicit psychoacoustic phenomena, they produce sounds that challenge universalized notions of auditory perception, while stretching the boundary of what the listener’s ear is capable of.

Phenomenon #1

Hunter Brown

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