Stephen Adam: Chromophony (1993)

Abstract

"The imaginary title loosely translates from the Greek as 'coloured voice'. The human voice provides a significant range of sound types for electroacoustic transformation, (d)evolution, or colouring. This piece takes samples from that palette of possibilities, focussing on the utterances and sustained textures which maintain links with the human voice, even under radical modification. The piece contrasts discrete and continuous elements in various ways. At the lowest formal level, the pseudo-linguistic solo utterances with which the piece opens stand in opposition to the sustained, unvoiced and 'massed' sound textures whose emotive and morphological attributes are far less clearly defined. At a higher formal level, the (discrete) episodes in the early stages of the work which incidentally outline a symbolic transition from 'higher' to 'lower' life form give way to a predominantly transformational (continuous) motion. At a little over halfway through the piece, this trajectory is reiterated; its commencement is marked by the 'explosion of plosives' which gradually merge and subside to reveal a single, and substantially time stretched, utterance. While this section reinforces the motion from discrete to continuous sound events, it simultaneously mirrors the overall trajectory of solo voice to dense texture evident in the first half of the piece. With only a few exceptions, the sounds used in the piece are of vocal origin and, in order of frequency of appearance, are the voices of Joan Pollock, Trish Anderson and myself." -- Stephen Adam Show more