MINDSCAPE

Price :$5

Duration: 12 Minutes

Type: Chamber Orchestra with soloists and electronics, GRM audio engineering (Groupe de Recherche Musicale, Maison de Radio France), duration 24 minutes, European premiere,

Produced at: Présence festival, Radio France orchestra, auditorium O.Messiaen

Description:

Mindscape's technical problematic concerns the sound processing of orchestral instruments and their possible augmentation by computer means. The piece mixes the natural (but extended) sounds of the orchestra's instruments with electronic sounds derived successively from their pre-recording and time-delayed processing. This is the first time that the orchestra has been sampled desk by desk and that, thanks to recent technological developments, it is possible to create continuous glissandi on the orchestral mass whatever the acoustic source. What was possible with fretless instruments (the orchestra's strings) is now possible with discontinuous-sound instruments such as many wind instruments - brass and woodwinds. Unlike Cello&Co, in Mindscape the aim is precisely not to resort to real-time sound processing practices in order to make changes to the writing of pre-recorded samples that would increase their acoustic reality. Instead, the aim is to treat the flow of writing as a new instrument, once electronically fixed, malleable like the sample, and to ensure that the piece's pre-recorded material (specific instrumental sequences) is electronically instrumentalized, in the same way as a written sequence to which we would add playing modes and other acoustic transformations on timbre or texture.