Diditix - Electronic Music

La materia è sorda - world premiere 6/6/84,

Universita' della Calabria, Arcavacata di Rende (CS).

composers: Roberto Doati, Gianantonio Patella, Daniele Torresan

Realized at: Center of Computational Sonology of the University of Padua

supported from RAI Radio Televisione Italiana

The composition was born from the collaboration of three musicians. This fact in itself created a first major problem, since the great potential offered by the computer favors the emergence not only of numerous "styles", but also of different approaches.

The macrostructure of the composition was therefore to ensure formal organicity. At the same time, a certain work independence was desired for each of the three composers.

These two requirements were met by operating not so much on the material (the use of different materials would lead to a kind of sound collage), but on the macrostructure.

The latter was made from three songs composed in the Dolce Stil Novo time.

Without going into too much detail, we will now mention the different proceases to which each composer has submitted such data.

Torresan used a Pascal language program that allowed him to read the data of the analyses mentioned above, and to convert them into the appropriate values for three different instruments in Music V language (Mathews, 1969) (Risset, 1969), each of which is associated with one of the songs. These instruments are:

a) instrument generating sounds of the type 'bell';

b) instrument to generate sound events made up of sinusoid bands with the presence of beats and roughness.

c) instrument generates percussive sounds with variable height during the development of the envelope

In particular, the spectrum type of sounds generated by the instruments is closely connected to the formantic content of the phonemes relating to the texts of the poems.

The program also allows you to assign envelopes of amplitude and musical height to the groups of notes Music V.