Electronics

Water, just like any other natural object, has impacted human life through various natural phenomena, and became associated with symbols, images, and personal memories. Sound, and the soundscape made by water are also subject to such contemplation. Contrary to finely articulated sound – what we call music, in general - soundscape consists of chaotic emanations but is clearly identifiable by the prominent acoustic characters that guide our imagination. In A Sunken City, I focused on reimagining water sound (movement 1) and city soundscape (movement 2) to an alternative narrative absent from the original – the flood (movement 3).

While individual sounds imply specific instances of water through a temporal trajectory, so do the movements of visual objects in this piece. Each item stands for a symbol of a specific soundscape, but the performer’s action depicts another image of a flood, subsequently evoking further imagination. Furthermore, the narration of The Flood, a poem by Robert Frost also hinders the listeners from settling on one specific interpretation, imposing another layer to the physical – the destructive force of human violence and its impact. Ultimately, the whole scene culminates into a chaotic (still watery) soundscape with overlapping audiovisual expressions and attached meanings.

The title Die unsichtbare Nacht means “invisible night” in German.

I took a short sound sample from my squeaking footstep noise on the wet floor, and then dissembled, modified, and mixed together. As a result, the original material is hardly perceptible to the audience. While the sound is separated from the context, these newly processed samples create another context that imitates the natural soundscape of the dark forest. Strong wind, dog bark, insects, broken wind chimes…. However, none of them sounds purely natural. Rather, they still have some artificial touch that gives an uncanny feeling. A similar discrepancy happens between the music and the video. The clips in the video are strictly coordinated with the music, but it gives the wrong relation between individual scenes and sounds. This discordance amplifies the eerie feeling, produces much tension, and, most importantly, summons a certain drama that undergoes these audio-visual events. 

This piece is intended to be a “subpiece,” which only can exist through the presence of another piece. That means, like a parasite, it feeds the other programmed piece as material. Also, it is like a “phantom of the opera” appearing randomly, roaming around the concert hall, looking for prey.

Technically, it takes three minutes from any recordings and reinterprets them. It distorts the original file like a computer virus, full of disjoined fragments and glitches. On top of that, it speaks through a text-to-speech voice, as if it confesses a distorted love to the host. Though this piece repeats a pre-programmed text, it pretends human emotion. Eventually it oscillates between the originality and the derivativeness, while focusing on the contrast between the expressional voice and the emotionless algorithm, and the living music and parasitizing music.

I have written many pieces using Daft Punk’s guitar riff (in their Aerodynamic), which has been my earworm for several years. This piece is the second of those, as a variation of rhythm and tone colors, with a fixed pitch motif. The player can variate this figure into unprecedented ways, and even override and reverse the composer-guided direction.

The player performs this piece with a game controller made by the composer. Also, the audience may be confused as if the player actually plays a rhythm game while watching and listening game-like scene. 

This piece is based on the sounds of various "numbers stations" (or oddity stations). I used XPA2, XSL, V24, FO3 (those are all codenames of the stations), either cited or imitated. These sources occasionally play random patterns of tones or numbers to deliver enigmatic messages. Only intelligence receivers can solve these patterns via their number table. Thus, to the non-interested people, these are just meaningless. These signals do play repetitive "music" in limited rhythm and range. After recognizing that, I believed that it has the potential to be transformed into intended music. So I sliced, lengthened, modulated, distorted, and combined them into one piece. After processing, these individual sounds deliver no messages, but it sounds like a fake-numbers station.

This piece consists of four sections. In each section, sounds are processed differently processed to make various color changes, like adding filters, making background noises, or whiling tones, etc. By doing this, I made not just a series of oddities, but music with a cryptic soundscape.