The image which inspired this piece (more information below) made me think about sheets of paper, and the sentences that had been on them which had now been rendered devoid of any meaning whatsoever by the "redacting" process.  Lastly, the ragged right edge of the image made me think of a paper shredder.  
I built the piece from three elements:  paper noises, vocal sounds, and the sound of a shredder.  The paper sounds were recorded at close range and used with very little modification other than combining large numbers of them at one time.  The vocal sounds heard in the piece are resynthesized from linear-predictive coding (LPC) analyses of recording of me reading a list of synonyms for the word "redacted".  The shredder sound is close-mike recorded, and then processed slightly.
The voice resynthesizer let me produce streams of "conversation" which were, like the NSA document, utterly unintelligible.  The shredder acts as an interrupter and a divider.  The paper sounds take on many roles, including the ostinato near the end.
The individual sounds were edited and processed using my own software, MiXViews, and the public domain software RTcmix (http://www.rtcmix.org).  The final mix was done using Logic Pro X.

***

More on this 83rd Disquiet Junto project, in which a page from recently declassified documents related to NSA collection of telephone metadata records is treated as a graphically notated score, at:

disquiet.com/2013/08/01/disquiet0083-redacted/

Image found via twitter.com/shearm and twitter.com/glennf.

Full document at:

goo.gl/wVydxR

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

Groups – Disquiet-junto

Shred Act [disquiet0083-redacted]

for piano and live electronics. Recorded by Kati Gleiser.

Kati Gleiser, the pianist for whom I wrote Blue Traces, told me about swimming in the ocean at night and marveling at the colorful glow cast from bioluminescent plankton. Moving your arm through the water disturbs the plankton, and in response they set off a bluish trail of soft light. This image gave me the idea for the piece: the piano plays, and the computer creates gently glowing traces of sound. Near the end, everyone becomes more agitated, as if the swimmer were now splashing around and the plankton reacting with more excitement.

All the computer sound comes from live sampling of the piano performance, transformed by various kinds of granulation — a technique that can take a short sound and extend it into a long sustained note.

Blue Traces

This piece was my doctoral dissertation and concerns itself with the musical ideas of the Jims Morrison, Hendrix, and Jamerson. I didn't quote from any of their music, but instead let their influence freely circulate with my own thoughts. Scored for stereophonically arranged flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, horn, tuba, upright piano, electric bass, drum set, two violins, viola, cello, and bass. Also check out the fancy studio version on my album "Studies in Light and Sound!"

Performers: IU New Music Ensemble, Don Freund, dir.

Jim, Jimi, and James

2012 Dean's Prize Commission for sinfonietta
Live performance by IU NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE on 4/19/13
Conducted by Nick Hersh 

Illustration by S. Fisher Williams: http://www.sfisherwilliams.com/

As A Spell, Against Falling Objects (or How I Learned to Love Gravity) (live recording)

John Gibson’s acoustic and electroacoustic music has been presented in the US, Canada, Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia. His instrumental compositions have been performed by many groups, including the London Sinfonietta, the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Seattle Symphony, the Music Today Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, Ekko!, and at the Tanglewood, Marlboro and June in Buffalo festivals. Presentations of his electroacoustic music include concerts at the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the Bourges Synthèse Festival, the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music, the International Biennial for Electroacoustic Music of Sao Paulo, Keio University in Japan, the Third Practice Festival, the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, and several ICMC and SEAMUS conferences. Among his grants and awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Foundation Grants, and the Paul Jacobs Memorial Fund Commission from the Tanglewood Music Center. Recordings of his music appear on the Centaur, Everglade, and SEAMUS labels. Gibson holds a Ph.D. in music from Princeton University, where he studied with Milton Babbitt, Paul Lansky, Steven Mackey, and others. He writes sound processing and synthesis software, and has taught composition and computer music at the University of Virginia, Duke University, and the University of Louisville. He is now Associate Professor of Composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Blue Traces

John Gibson - composer

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