Title: 10 Electroacoustic Studies
Year Completed: 2009
Duration: 38 mins
Instrumentation: 2 Channel Audio



If interested in performing this work please contact the Canadian Music Centre.



The 10 Electroacoustic Studies created between June and December of 2009. Each study started with one sound or premise, such as rotational motion, or plastic. A few of the studies took up to four days to complete, others took just a morning. Sounds were created and/or processed in my home studio, including smashing glass. Driftwood was collected from Halls Harbour, NS, and creaking sounds are from the doors in my house. Most background pad-like sounds were created using granular synthesis techniques in Max/MSP.

1. Study in Rotational Motion
2. Study in Plastic 1
3. Study in Plastic 2
4. Study in Polystyrene Foam
5. Study in Driftwood
6. Study in Glass
7. Study in Liquid
8. Study in Metal
9. Study in Creaks
10. Study in Air
dedicated to Morton Feldman

Study in Air was created using mostly airy and aeolian flute sounds; using a piccolo, C and alto flutes. I began this one by improvising aeolian sounds on the flutes followed by a few improvisations with voice alone. I found a bit of a piccolo sound that I liked. I imported it into a sampler, played a melody and used this as the thread to spin the work from. This melody – you will hear it as a high, seemingly synthesizer-like short 5 plus note chromatic melodic fragment that slowly changes – evolves through the entire work, similar to the melodies in many of Morton Feldman's pieces: seemingly mathematically derived transformations that defy logic, but are beautiful in their starkness and subtle rhythmic shifts. And that's what this study is all about: being stark, sparse and always in FLUX. Nothing repeats exactly the same. All of the sounds are constantly transformed, and by the end all that is left, all that remains static, is the sampled piccolo.