Although the "overture" composition will involve many of the references to the sound and structures of Islamic musical culture and its influence on the Singaporean/Malay culture that this chamber opera pay homage, the concept of "cacophony" and the sound of "wood" is otherwise unexplored. In her vivid description of culture and its manifestation in sound, the narrator describes a dawn chorus of wooden frames, hollow drums and wooden objects that resound in a noisy summoning to worship. She mentions it as a disruptive and unavoidable sonic force, though accepted as a reality in their world.
In another composition, a "floating" movement that may feature at any point used as an underscoring texture OR signposting event, will be structured of a mass of wooden sound. Despite the tendency of cachophonic textures to suggest randomisation, I would prefer this fixed-media work with its acousmatic aesthetic, to feature a highly deliberate form.
For this composition I need to develop further conceptual notions regarding two musical elements:
SONIC OBJECTS
A multitude of closely mic-ed wooden objects will be recorded, as a series of short strikes, surface scrapes, rattle and jette articulations. This catalog of wooden sounds will become the vocabulary of samples to be structured in a way that is at once organized and chaotic.
STRUCTURE
"Organic" wood and "synthetic" structure will be juxtaposed by a pair of mathematical entities that mirror the proposed figurative dichotomy. The Fibonacci series and Pascal's triangle, two interconnected yet vastly different concepts, manipulate the hindu-arabic numeral system in interesting ways. I wish to harness the quality of sequences in the structure of the sonic objects, which will be catergorized and varied in a way that will facilitate a modular application to the macro-structure.
Some additional reading:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PascalsTriangle.html
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FibonacciNumber.html
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