This was my first composition assignment, a “simple modal tune”. 

The title comes from an installment of Neil de Grasse Tyson’s “Star Talk”, which featured Wayne Shorter
translating a cosmic phenomenon into sound:
https://youtu.be/Czfo2EDumgU

Music for Strange Places in Time and Space

Feel the Photon

Terms of Occupancy is a 5.1 remix and extended variation of a previous stereo work, à la cire perdue (2004), this previous work itself a re-appropriation and reworking of materials from some of my previous instrumental and vocal works. The title Terms of Occupancy refers to the strategies and methods that bind me to the sounds I deploy as well as a preoccupation with multi-spatial determination for these sonic objects. The confrontation with an expanded spatial parameter led me to a substantial reshaping of the original sounds as well as a total recasting of their compositional possibilities.
Terms of Occupancy was originally an attempt to compose for an eight-channel audio performance system via a two-channel monitoring system, the missing ‘real’ channels being supplied by virtual and imagined spatial strategies given visual support within a multi-track audio sequencing environment.  Just as an orchestrator summons the sound of an oboe to mind when scoring for a large ensemble, or an architect engages their experience of shape, colour and function to conceive and model a new structure, composers draw upon both intuitive spatial knowledge and consciously acquired spatial predilections and explorations in their animation of sounding space. Composing Terms of Occupancy in this ‘virtual’ fashion meant imagining and hearing more than was audibly present upon playback. The challenge in subsequently re-composing and recasting Terms of Occupancy for the 5.1 format was the transposition and adaptation of a language of spatial movement within, firstly the octophonic and then the  stereo realm, to a fundamentally different spatial palette that afforded a new set of possibilities for meaningful movement and integration within the compositional design.

Terms Of Occupancy

Pourriez-vous être le couteau dans ma vie?
Could you be the knife in my life?
(2004)
Violin, Violoncello, Piano, Digital Signal Processing
Duration = 18 minutes

Laurie Radford

Gleam		Edge 		Curve		Point		Incision		Plunge

Action demands incision, a rending of skin, plunging into the flesh and mechanism beneath; a fearless touching, hearing, and seeing of that which must be known. The violin bow slices time into strips of cause and effect; the piano keys cut pitch into equal portions of dream and regret; synchronized bodies rend space for all to enter and be marked. The gleaming edge, the curve and point of these actions are the destination, the finely ground line of resistance and insistence, the source of delight and delirium as one scurries across the cusp of knowing. 
We are the instruments of others’ fears and terrors, needs and desires. In donning the role of instrument, we feel both the wound of subjugation and the pain of freedom. The rapiers of bow and string shred one reality and offer us another, plead and demand, heal and destroy, with both sound and silence.
Pourriez-vous être le couteau dans ma vie? continues a line of work begun with horizo (2002) for 16 instruments and digital processing. The instruments of the ensemble are processed in real-time by various digital effects. In addition, the instruments also serve as the source of an electroacoustic component: fragments of the instrumentalists’ performance are captured and subsequently transformed and combined with other fragments to create a virtual ensemble that revisits the live ensemble later in the work. Process and sound are unified in the actions of the performers.

Feel the Photon

halvorsonics

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