My name is Lea Bertucci. And I'm here today to give a talk about
the possibilities of 4-dimensional composition.
This is just a thing I made up, much like a lot of art that exists in the world.
So it's this technique that I've been thinking about and incorporating a lot into my work the past couple of years.
So it's this whole idea of a musical composition that exists across time and space.
And what are the possibilities of 3-dimensional kind of approaches?
So we have spacialization, multi-channel speaker arrays, an audience that's allowed a roving perspective,
musicians that are spacialized throughout a venue. So this is kind of like getting away from
a proscenium style presentation.
So that's the 3rd dimension, and then we have the 4th of course, which is time.
So how do we play with time, extend time, alter people's notions of time?
There's lots of different techniques. So this whole idea was the basis
of a work that I did that was a site-specific piece presented within the hollow body of a bridge
in Cologne, Germany, this past year. This is a picture of the space.
It was 440 meters long. And it was the enclosed hollow body of a bridge that spanned the Rhine river.
It was a very acoustically incredible space. It had about 14 seconds of decay,
all sorts of amazing reflections and acoustic shadows and all sorts of very interesting acoustic phenomena
that I really wanted to explore and play with in the context of the compositions.
So the compositions were 3 pieces that unfolded across the span of a week.
It was also incorporated with an installation element, so I'll go through the whole project.
So, this is the site. When I say "site-specific", I think this is a term that kind of gets
kicked around a lot in the experimental world.
And it's something that, if you actually go back to the origins of this term, it comes from earthworks artists
from the 60s, Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, etc. So it's art that is dependent on the site.
It does not make sense if it's taken off the site.
So the space is actually the area that you can see that's slightly below the roadway,
so it's this enclosed space. It's very dark and very huge.
This is a picture of part of the bridge with lights on and here's what it sounds like.
So what you were hearing there is a tram that goes over the bridge once every 15 minutes.
So this was an element that I really wanted to find a creative way to incorporate into this project.
It's very low and it's hard to get a sense of how actually visceral this sound is.
It really is very loud, about 96dB, the baseline kind of level of noise is about 70dB
when the train's not going over it. So it's a very loud kind of space.
So with the tram going over it, you get this really interesting kind of lateral motion moving from one side
to the next, and you can hear when the train starts and you can hear the sound expand
and get more intense as it goes over you wherever you happen to be in the bridge.
So this is kind of a thing I was thinking about as I was composing these pieces of music.
Here's the planning sections of the bridge. The first drawing we're seeing is a side view
of the bridge, very similar to the photograph I just showed you.
The second is a plan, so an overhead view. And the third section cuts so you can see
sort of the nature of the hollow body.
When I was developing the score for this piece I was using the architectural layouts as a way to design
how I was going to place players in this space.
The other element of this is that there was an 8-channel speaker system installed all throughout the bridge.
As you can see, the little red marks are where I had the speakers laid out, so that was a very important part
of just trying to activate the entire space.
So the first element of this piece was kind of a long-form durational project. The first thing was I really wanted to
deal with this train sound that happened, so I designed a sine-wave sweep.
This came out of this technique a lot of acousticians do when working in a space, of putting a sine wave sweep
through the speaker and then analysing the resonant frequencies of the room.
So that's what I had the people organizing this project do for me
as a way of preliminary preparing to deal with this space.
So I was able to find out what the room tone was. It was about 64 hertz.
And I based the harmonic content of the compositions on the harmonic series using 64 hertz as the fundamental.
So it was a way for the instruments to very directly deal with the acoustics and activate the space sonically.
So, going back to the train.
When I listened to the recordings of the sweeps that they gave me,
I was really taken aback by how powerful it was
to hear a sine wave moving up and down in this extraordinarily resonant space.
So what I wanted to do was have a gesture that would be triggered every time the train went over the bridge.
So basically it was a sine wave that would start super low in one speaker, and then go up
and then come down into another speaker. So it was a sweep that kind of went in this motion across.
So it was kind of alluding to that lateral motion I was talking about.
But then having that super full frequency range allowed me to see what frequencies popped out.
So you can hear one of these sweeps.
So as you can hear, it came up one side of the speakers and then down the other.
So I called these "sound arches". And every time the train would go over it would happen
and it was kind of like part of the installation component of this piece.
This was done with a Pure Data patch. It was triggered by frequency and volume of the train.
We had the bridge open for visitors over the course of the week.
And on the first day there was the first intervention, they were called "acoustic shadows".
So it was the first one for alto saxophone. I play alto saxophone.
So I was the performer. Hooray! And so it was just a way to kind of sonically start to activate this space.
So every time a composition would happen, or a performance, pieces of that performance
were miked and recorded, looped and layered on top of itself, then distributed throughout the 8 channels
as a durational installation that people could enjoy. There's also a bunch of fancy bussing stuff I was doing
with GRM Spaces, a really great tool if you're interested in doing multi-channel routing that's automated.
So I will play you a little bit of that. This is actually the part where it's the installation,
so you can hear the saxophone moving all throughout the 8-channel speaker system.
As it turns out, it's very difficult to document a spacialized site-specific piece of art.
Who would have thought? But the way that I was conceiving of it is that it's a sound that moves
from one side of the speakers to the other and it was actually 3 loops that were overdubbed,
and layered that would be just circumambulating amongst the speakers.
So you could walk freely throughout the bridge and always have a different perspective
depending on where you're standing. If you're standing in one place for a long time
you'll hear that movement, but if you're moving yourself, then you get a very different kind of perspective.
And I'm always interested in the subjectivity of the perception of an audience.
So then... that piece then would exist as an installation for the next 3 days.
On the 4th day, the 2nd composition took place which was for a brass octet. It was trombones and trumpets.
So I had each player distributed again throughout the bridge.
And it was the same idea where bits of what they were playing were being sampled
and layered on top of themselves
and then existed again as an installation after the performance.
So each performance would kind of take this shape where there would be a hard beginning to the performance
but no ending, because the installation would just kind of take over. So, again, it's this idea
of playing with notions of time, taking a linear composition and making it non-linear through looping
and having it exist as a durational installation. I'll play you a bit of that.
You can also hear the train going over the bridge.
So that low rumble you were beginning to hear is the train.
So the 3rd and final piece was for percussion. So it was 3 percussionists.
I think I neglected to mention that the bridge was kind of divided up into 3 different spaces.
They were completely accessible but divided up. There was a small doorway from one section to the next.
So for the 3rd piece I had 3 percussionists. One was in the left, one in the center, and one in the right
area of the bridge.
And I had the playing a mixed bag of things. We were able to get a timpani,
which makes me very excited. The timpani sounded incredible, 'cause it's a very low-pitched kind of drum.
And there are so many low frequencies happening in the bridge. The resonant frequency is super low.
So I was interested in playing with that bassiness that was already there. This is the score...
from the percussion piece. So the way that I score is usually a mixture of staff and graphic notation.
I specify a lot of extended technique. It's semi-improvisational but definitely
with a very particular structure.
And then I'll play you a bit. So this is one the percussionists doing rolls on the timpani.
So one of the rules of the music is to play with the space. So I developed a technique called "decay swells"
where you swell, in terms of volume, on an instrument, so a roll that became pianissimo,
and then went up to forte with a hard stop to allow the player to hear the resonance in the space.
and then begin again at the volume that you hear the decay,
if that makes sense. So we'll just listen to that and I'll get off the stage.
So again, it's very difficult to document this stuff. But I hope that you could kinda hear the way
that the sound was traveling through the space and reflecting at the end of the corridor and coming back.
That's all.