2-5/60 - Saturation - Contest!
I am delighted to dedicate the 4 new minutes of the 60/60 project to a generous participant, and close relation of mine, Brigitte Urien.
Saturation is a musical setting of Ruth Lepson's poem Saturation (yes, it's the same title,) featuring the poet herself as the main speaker. Remember, I met Ruth last summer, and we had fun performing and improvising together.
Saturation, the poem, was published in the review Carve - poems in August 2006.
Saturation in Music and Poetry
Among the four great presents that I received for this piece, the one that surprised me the most is The New Media Reader. It is a fascinating book, that puts into perspective the Internet with the Oulipo movement, Eliza, and other essential projects of the 20th century. It gave me the idea of using Speech Synthesis to read a few sentences of the poem. This book addresses the concept of Saturation, not in water like the poem, but in information and communication.
Speech Synthesis sounds like advanced technology, but this time it's just my laptop reading with more or less funny voices. If you use a Mac, it's really easy to do. Create a new document with the TextEdit Application, type a few words (in English), and do Menu Edit -> Speech -> Start Speaking :-)
Contest: win Morphology!
The last two verses of Ruth Lepson's poem are:
I love
Arthur Dove
In my sonic work, Ruth doesn't speak these words. You will be the winner if you are the first person to find out how these two verses are suggested. I will offer you Ruth Lepson and Walter Crump's newest book: Morphology. It is a difficult contest, so here is a hint: you are looking for two references, one for "I love", another one for "Arthur Dove"; these are the 2 last lines of the poem, so listen carefully to the end of the music.
60/60 project: thank you!
Thank you to all the participants. More compositions will come, as you will see and hear on this blog. Subscribe to the RSS feed to stay tuned.
I address very special thanks to Ruth Lepson. She accepted, not only to lend her words, but also to come to the studio and record them. In the spirit of the 60/60 project, I will offer her a present. I have already chosen it, but it has not arrived from France yet. I will let you know about it, but for the moment, I prefer to keep it a surprise for Ruth ;-)
To participate, visit the 60/60 composition project FAQs.
Attribution
I must credit Mario Caroli for a few flute samples that I recorded (first appearance at 03:33).
You can hear mouse clicks, computer keyboard and printers, and a few sounds from The Freesound project. Here is the attribution list. Click to listen to the original sounds:
- Speech synthesis by an Atari: repeat.wav (at 03:25), stop.wav (at 03:31), and atari.wav (at 03:40) by irrlicht
- ti99 cassette program.wav (at 03:42), by datasoundsample
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