http://www.synesthesiarecordings.com/docs/Flux.jpg

U.S.O. Project - Flux

http://www.synesthesiarecordings.com/docs/Field.jpg

U.S.O. Project - Field

http://www.synesthesiarecordings.com/docs/Ton.jpg

U.S.O. Project - Ton

HEADSCAPE is an immersive concert that exploits the peculiarities of listening through headphones to present performances otherwise impossible to achieve.

Recorded 23rd June, 2011 @ O' - no profit organization.
The concert has been broadcasted over the Internet in real time. 

Live mixing and spatialization by Matteo Milani (U.S.O. Project).
The actual distributed version is rendered using U.S.O. Project's custom binaural techniques for headphone listening only.

www.sincronie.org
www.on-o.org


U.S.O. Project @ Headscape 2011 (binaural)

It's night.
There are no precise coordinates, nor recognizable signs that can lead us back to a familiar place.
And yet those sounds remind us, almost pathetically, of a summer night scene, to which we listened countless times.
But that’s not what this is.
The slow and articulated flow of pulsating energy gradually takes a structure, enabling us to be part of
something very different.
The flow surrounds us, passes through us.
We can’t see it, nor touch it, but every particle interferes with our body, with our biological substrate.
Far away, a storm is coming, perhaps.
It’s neither natural, nor inoffensive. It deceives us with the variety of its harmony of timbres.
The structure suddenly changes, reorganizing itself while turning us into something new.
A breach made of light. It’s oscillating.
Then, silence.
The air stagnates, suspended and motionless.
An electrical impulse.
One more.
Others follow, one after another, fainter and more distant.
(Sounds), like petals made of ash.


F'Shima was designed and built around a series of recordings of electromagnetic fields generated by various electronic devices (Hard Drives, iPad, iPhone, Portable Game Consoles ...), recordings made ​​by using old analog phone-captors.
The source material, sometimes fully recognizable, sometimes radically altered, has been digitally processed using the Kyma Sound Design environment.
The whole piece is literally the output of a composite Patch which consists of several parallel processing chains and an algorithmic mixing system (in space and time).
There are four Comb Filters, followed by a Lowpass Filter, a Granular Timeshifter, a tool for the Convolution with impulse response sampled in real time (at irregular intervals), made by a bank of sinusoidal oscillators, and finally, a filtering system that operates dynamically in the frequency domain (up to 128 band pass filters).
The Kyma Sound is not controlled "directly" by a computer operator, rather by a series of control functions, previously generated and stored as wave-tables.
In order to avoid a natural redundancy of the Output, different presets (discrete states of the system) were prepared and stored, by carefully listening to their peculiarities and significance in sonological terms.

Subsequently, the control functions used inside several interpolators, have rendered the musical work in time and space.
This piece consists of a selection of the most musically relevant material obtained during 3 different "RUNs" of the above Kyma Sound.

F'Shima

"Nibble, nibble, gnaw,
Who is nibbling at my little house?"
The children answered:
"The wind, the wind,
The heaven-born wind."


Gretel's New Clothes is, in a way, an acousmatic reinvention of the famous fairytale by the Brothers Grimm.
It is in the form of a Rondò.
There is no attempt to literally retrace the story, rather to suggest it in a subtle way, through the use of strongly characterized sound materials (footsteps in the woods, the wind, the "sounds" of the night...) which are then dialogically processed during the final Violin and Cello improvisation.
The End is the "vanishing point" of the whole story, action- and at the same time comment-wise.
The whole work (with the exception of the final duet) is based on two pre-recorded sources: a soundwalk in the woods (about 6-7 minutes long) and a Cello improvisation which makes use of extended techniques.
These are the only materials around which the entire narrative structure takes shape and articulates.
After an explicit introduction, that invites us to contextualize the action in time and space (the slow pace of footsteps on the wood, almost lost and uncertain) the first transformation suspends the imitative and narrative context, in order to transport us into a more abstract, intangible dimension, which suggests a fabulous and unusual nature of the event in progress.
Then - after restoring the initial context (footsteps on wood) - a new narrative element is introduced into the listening experience, in the form of cyclic variation.
This is a series of permutations and micro-articulations of the material which was presented previously (soundwalk+Cello). Everything is accompanied by occasional "external" interventions, achieved through the use of Modal synthesis techniques (models of resonance).
The final section, a sort of recapitulation-epilogue, is entrusted to Violin and Cello.
The electro-acoustic interaction is created using the Kyma Sound Design Environment.
The actions and gestures of the two performers are cyclically written into a buffer and then re-read at high speed (without changing the pitch) by selecting only the transients (while the sinusoidal components are discarded) through the Phase Vocoder.
The spatial dimension is controlled algorithmically by the use of stochastic processes in real-time.


“They walked the whole night and all the next day too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest, and were very hungry, for they had nothing to eat... And as they were so weary that their legs would carry them no longer, they lay down beneath a tree and fell asleep.”

Gretel's New Clothes

“...Your hand will find out all your enemies;
your right hand will find out those who hate you.
You will make them as a blazing oven
when you appear.
The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath,
and fire will consume them.”


Psalm21 is not a religious work.
There is no implication of a celebratory or ritual nature.
The dominant and recurring element during the composition of the piece, is the relationship between creation (as a constantly evolving act), creator (of which we ignore existence and features) and creature (as a self-conscious subject that reflects on his nature).
These three elements are the driving force around which the work unfolds.
The work is divided into four “tableau” and a coda.
The opening act is performed by a flute electronically processed in real time.
The act of creation is manifested through the rapid flow of pulses generated by double tonguing, sudden "bursts" of air/energy and the frantic clicking emitted by the key mechanism of the instrument.
A torrent of energy that is desperately trying to organize itself in some form of stable matter.
Flute appears to us as the "tool of the Demiurge."
It’s amplified with a microphone placed inside the instrument’s body in order to "magnify" its size in terms of perception, thus giving the listener the impression of being inside it.
The next section seems to consolidate what happened before, giving rise to coalescence, aggregation of matter, twists, unexpected and deeply destructive morphological changes.
Gradually we move away from this hot and unstable place to plunge into a solitary, introverted and motionless dimension.
Human presence is perceptively introduced in the form of tactile manipulation of an object (a symbol of empirical experience). It explores, hears, remembers.
The whole scene is immersed in a seemingly irreversible and impenetrable stasis.
The penultimate act reintroduces the plastic and material element, which continues its search for a tangible and organized dimension, through emergent behaviors and statistically significant changes.
The gradual assertion of a "zone of stability", symbolically characterized by a diatonic cluster, seems to trigger a cathartic mechanism, a higher order that leads us back to safe and familiar places, through the imposition of a continuing harmonic structure.
In the end a subtle tremble, a weak vacuum fluctuation which brings the silence that inevitably precedes a new beginning.


Psalm 21 - Technical notes

The work was made ​​entirely using the Kyma Sound Design Environment and Serge Modular Synthesizer.
For the original electronic part on the flute solo, the Kyma Sound proceeds to write the live source into a buffer in real time to re-sample it at variable speed (up to 4 layers without pitch variations).
Other filtering operations (modal synthesis) were produced in order to create different modes of resonance (unrelated to the nature of the instrument), which in turn were written and played back cyclically.
The algorithm does not require the presence of a computer operator, since the control system has been implemented in real time with the aid of amplitude followers and derived functions (a sort of control signals network).
By choosing the appropriate configurations of granular re-sampling, it was possible to obtain a dense, pulsating and articulated texture, controlled directly by the flautist during his performance.
The next section is organized around a very articulate Kyma Sound, conceived as a real-time performance tool using an iPad as a virtual control surface.
This Sound initiates several parallel processing chains, where various types of modulation and resynthesis techniques are employed. It’s all made ​​gesturally accessible using an application written by Carla Scaletti: Kyma Control.
The source material was entirely produced by the well-known CrackleBox realized at Steim (Studio for Electro Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam.
Other items of different origin and nature, which appear in this and the following sections, were made ​​using a contact microphone in conjunction with the Modular Synth. Many of the patching techniques use feedback, distortion and waveshaping procedures.
The final section takes up the processing procedures of Section II, but this time they are applied to instrumental sources - in this case two improvisations performed with flute and cello.
The ending crescendo has been realized by overdubbing the sound of the cello (its timbre has been modified in some transitions via the resonant filters and the ring modulator of Serge Modular).
In order to obtain these sustained sonorities, long held notes have been recorded without using vibrato. Later, during editing, the sound produced by the change of bow direction was removed, together with amplitude micro fluctuations and short transients produced unintentionally by the performer, thus giving the impression of a continuous and stable sound.

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