Polydimensional Scores: Alter_Walk

Polydimensional Scores: Alter_Walk

Score by Kaïa Barth-Lessard
Music and video by Brady Marks

Notes from Kaïa Barth-Lessard:
Alter; is a score that is meant for what its name means. It is ever-changing; different people will read and compose from their own contexts, with their own perspectives.

Notes from Brady Ciel Marks:
Approach
Interpretation as sonification and electro-acoustic construction, which runs from left to right contrasting literal and metaphoric interpretive techniques. Attempts to interpret the macroscopic structure in the microscopic, reflecting the fractal nature of the landscape and in this way superimposes figure and gesture.

Contour
The monochrome homogeneity suggested a drone. The composition asked me to look beyond the pen line to see the paper, its texture became the start, which is a sample of a textured watercolour paper close microphone recorded and scratched. This motif of score as a literal piece of paper reoccurs thought the piece. The contours upper and lower are foundational and visceral, I adhered to their strictness, initially tracing the upper counter pixel by pixel and sonifying it as it the intensity and harmonic brightness of a D drone which defines the body of the interpretation. It is voiced with the Don Buchla inspired Make Noise 0-Coast synthesizer. In contrast the lower contours were improvised as two swirling tones on the Roli Seaboard
(iPadOS) which allowed multi-dimensional expressive sides of the pitch and timbre to stand for the diverging and conjoining nature of this lower pathway.

Time
A time division was created with a literal grid (seen below), after which the timing of this was resynchronized to the recording or a loose timing called out while walking, at the bend / turning point the walk turns up hill after slowing down. The loose timing can be heard vocalized intermittently throughout the piece.

Accents
Each scored accent around the contour is interpreted as isolated sound objects. In particular we hear a synthesized gong, wooden marimba and samples of marking, tearing and scratching the rough watercolour paper along with samples of a cloud of small birds feeding. These accents are often spatialized to the left and right as if the audience is walking along the contour line. The divergent lines are presented as a wavering cello, and angle of the lines up and down, are
mapped to slow pitch bends.

A Bend in the Path
The initial interpretation is resampled though an improvised Karplus–Strong style millisecond scale delay with feedback to produce phasing and resonance, characteristic of a bend or grinding of the work around the corner.

Presented by Vancouver New Music in association with Emily Carr University of Art and Design.