Concatenative Variations of a Passage by Mahler

IN PROGRESS

I Passage I (2:37)

II Gates I (2:21)

III Creatures (1:21)

IV Boils and Bells (1:07)

V Lix Tetrax (1:29)

VI Saxubus (2:45)

VII Passage II (2:04)

VIII A Capella (2:06)

IX Highway to Heaven,
Stairway to Hell (2:13)

X Limbo (2:23)

XI Gates II (2:07)

XII - XX Coming soon... (?:??)

Spring, 2005

Program References

Program Notes

One morning in early 1999 at around 6 am I was sitting in front of Rodin's "Gates of Hell" at Stanford University. I sat and just looked at the doors towering above me. Out of the silence I began to hear knocks coming from the doors. Once or twice every five minutes there would be a knock. I realized that the sculpture was slowly expanding from the rising warming sun.

This piece is a culmination of my research in concatenative music synthesis. For each movement I have used a variation of Mahler's famous drum crescendo of the second symphony as the target. The corpora are widely varied to produce startling and rich timbral differences. Each movement serves as a study of some aspect of concatenative synthesis, whether it be tightly restricted distance measures, synthesis window sizes, or other effects applied such as convolution or randomization.

References

Sturm, Bob L., "MATConcat: An Application for Exploring Concatenative Synthesis Using MATLAB," submitted to 2004 Digital Audio FX Conference, Naples, Italy, 2004.