Air 2023 II by Ulrich Müller published on 2023-04-26T11:45:01Z Air 2023 II This piece is created from a variety of experiments with speech sounds. The piece refers to a beautiful, melancholic poem by Jorge Luis Borges entitled Descartes. But this is not a setting in the classical sense. Instead, I took a few lines of the English translation of this poem and put together the words as best I could from phonemes taken from language teaching videos of over 50 languages - spoken by women and men - letter by letter. This was the basic material and all the sounds of this piece are developed from it without exception. Of the poem itself, no words or fragments of words appear in the piece that might be intelligible. Everything is pure sound. The harmonic-melodic material of the piece is derived from the Liebestod of Wagner´s opera Tristan und Isolde. Although I am not a great fan of Richard Wagner, this is a touching piece of music whose grand, romantic gesture is (at least for me) nevertheless admittedly outdated in these disillusioned times. So it is a reminiscence that also plays with the idea of the multilingual recitation of Borge´s poem by women and men - maybe a strange love story across language barriers. The harmonic sequence of Wagner´s piece was mirrored on a twelve-tone row and the resulting material was then subjected to various other serial processes and microtonal pitch changes according to the pitches of the phonemes. In a few places, however, the original music has remained recognizable, appearing for moments like a shadow. For the sonic transformations, I worked with spectral software, such as Steinberg's Spectral Layers and TS2 from Ircam labs. Later, granular software came into play, such as U&I's MetaSynth and accSone's Crusher X. I also converted individual phonemes and whole words into wavetables for further processing using the Waldorf Iridium. Genre Electronic Comment by Amazing Smash Good one! 👌 2023-06-27T07:54:46Z Comment by Michael Grunditz Good work! I also enjoy reading how it was made, amazing! 2023-06-16T19:03:16Z Comment by Negative Headphone Great atmosphere. So nice composition 2023-06-01T11:16:10Z Comment by Martin Hoogeboom Nice!! 2023-05-24T12:45:21Z Comment by Dror Elimelech Excellent ! 2023-05-24T12:17:49Z Comment by banalytic an impressive piece. complex, mysterious, dramatic & disturbingly beautiful... thanks for sharing! 2023-04-26T21:28:47Z