Kraig Grady e Etienne Deleflie

Second Flight over an Island Interior (2013)

- english version below -

Second Flight over an Island Interior è un lavoro che coniuga gli studi sulla rappresentazione tridimensionale del suono di Etienne Deleflie con le ricerche sulle accordature microtonali di Kraig Grady e viene presentato come un volo radente su un territorio fantastico. Anaphoria è un’isola immaginaria, nata dalla mente di Kraig Grady nei primi anni 90. In essa si ritrovano una varietà enorme di etnie, di miti e di culture musicali. Nel lembo sud orientale vi è un deserto che ospita particolari oasi sonore, vaste aree di suolo da cui emergono come da “geyser” suoni accordati secondo armonie matematiche e distribuiti in geometrie concentriche. In questa installazione sonora i due compositori offrono al pubblico l’esperienza acustica di un volo sul deserto di Anaphoria attraverso alcune di queste particolari mappature sonore.
Deleflie ha creato l’impressione del movimento non muovendo i suoni intorno all’ascoltatore ma muovendo l’ascoltatore attraverso un territorio. In questa sua tecnica tutte le sorgenti sonore si muovono nella stessa direzione e alla stessa velocità.
Si puo’ descrivere questo sistema come se l’ascoltatore si muovesse su una scacchiera di suoni.
Maggiori informazioni qui e qui.

Compositore, costruttore ed inventore di strumenti musicali, studioso di accordature universalmente riconosciuto, Kraig Grady è nato e cresciuto artisticamente in California e da alcuni anni vive in Australia vicino a Sidney. Alla sua attività di compositore e teorico affianca quelle di regista, organizzatore di concerti, marionettista di teatro d’ombre e curatore di programmi radiofonici.
Fin dall’incontro con il teorico Erv Wilson avvenuto nel 1975 Grady ha scritto ed eseguito le sue musiche utilizzando sistemi di accordatura microtonali di cui è diventato uno dei maggiori esperti mondiali. I suoi concerti sono eventi rari dato che per l’esecuzione è necessario trasportare gli strumenti originali, marimbe, metallofoni, salteri a percussione, organi a canne, tutti auto costruiti o modificati per rispondere a particolari esigenze di accordatura.
Dal 1993 il lavoro di Kraig Grady si è identificato con le attività di The North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island, una organizzazione no-profit per il sostegno di una terra a metà tra reale ed immaginario con la missione di raccogliere e difendere le diversità musicali del mondo.
[www.anaphoria.com]
[Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria]

Etienne Deleflie è un compositore e ricercatore che da più di un decennio lavora sulla diffusione e spazializzazione del suono. Le sue composizioni sono state eseguite in vari festival in Australia e all’estero. Programmatore e progettista di software ha fondato ambisonia.com, progetto ospitato dalla University of York e dedicato alla diffusione del sistema di registrazione e riproduzione audio ambisonic. Ha fondato inoltre SoundOfSpace.com e progettato il formato audio noto internazionalmente come Universal Ambisonic (UA). La sua tesi di dottorato per l’università di Wollongong in Australia, centrata sulla relazione tra la composizione musicale e la percezione dello spazio sonoro è in fase di pubblicazione. Le sue riflessioni sull’arte sonora e dintorni sono accessibili tramite il suo blog etiennedeleflie.net

Kraig Grady and Etienne Deleflie

Second Flight over an Island Interior (2013)

In this Sound installation entitled Second Flight over an Island Interior, the two composers Etienne Deleflie and Kraig Grady recreated a virtual territory based on the geography of Anaphoria Island.
Within its great Southeast desert one encounters great distances of emptiness broken up with the occasional oases where harmonies are sounded in various geometric arrays.
In this piece Etienne Deleflie created the impression of movement not by moving sounds around the listener, but rather by moving the listener through this territory. In this technique, all sound sources move in the same direction and at the same speed. Only one movement is modelled. It might be better to describe this organisation as the listener moving through a field of sounds, rather than sounds moving around the listener. This simple inversion restricts the movements possible but also expresses an abstraction of the experience of moving through stationary objects; a bushwalker walking through a still forest, or a train travelling through consecutive towns or in this case a low flying glider over a desert terrain. It is a very simple abstraction, but holds strong associations with human experience. The musical expression of this abstraction introduces other dimensions. By expressing each sound as a fixed pitch, sequences of pitches are crafted by moving through the grid using different trajectories. The capturing of the movement was realized by Deleflie.
The harmonic grid used, a recreation by Kraig Grady of ones found in Anaphoria, involve magic squares which are used to generate different recurrent sequences in different directions. As one flies through the grid, one descends from the upper reaches of the harmonics generated (just over the five thousandth harmonic) moving toward the center where the matrix descends into the teens. These are the lowest audible tones of a fundamental that is below hearing range. The grid is thus a spatio-temporal structure in extended just intonation. Just intonation refers to the technique of using pitch relationships that are mathematically pure that also correspond to how they unfold in nature in tone producing instruments. Two grids were used in this composition where all the pitches are sounded at once with the proximity determining the volume. Due to the tuning the interrelationships between pitches create both a blending and acoustical reinforcement of other pitches through sum and difference tones.
Grady designed two just intonation grids that were subsequently rendered in ImageSynth. Each grid requires only one image, and represents 2500 sound sources heard at vastly different distances, from over 400m to 2m away.
A singular pass through the grid takes around ten minutes; multiple passes thus create a significantly longer work, and extend the abstraction of moving through a scene into an extended journey. The resultant composition is the combination of half a dozen passes through Grady’s two different grid designs, organised in time by Deleflie and Grady.
More infos here and here.

Kraig Grady is a US-American composer. He has composed and performed with an ensemble of microtonal instruments of his own design and also worked as a shadow puppeteer, tuning theorist, filmmaker, world music radio DJ and concert promoter. His works feature his own ensembles of acoustic instruments. His compositions include accompaniments for silent films and shadow plays. An important influence in the development of Grady’s music was Harry Partch, like Grady, a musician from the Southwest, and a composer of theatrical works in Just Intonation for self-built instruments. Since meeting tuning theorist Erv Wilson in 1975, he has composed and performed in alternative tunings based on Wilson’s theories. In the early 1980s Grady and filmmaker Keith Barefoot created a number of performances combining live music with silent film. In his 1989 opera War and Pieces, he used film to project stage settings as well as illustrate the inner thoughts of the live performers.
Despite the fact that the size of his instruments make touring difficult, his work has been presented at Ballhaus Naunyn Berlin (Germany), the Chateau de la Napoule (France), the Norton Simon Museum of Art, the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, the Pacific Asia Museum, as well as numerous live performances on radio KPFK, KCRW, and KXLU. His work was also presented as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s American Music Weekend as well as New Music America 1985. He has been nominated four times for the LA Weekly Music Awards best uncategorizable artist and was chosen by Buzz Magazine as one of the “100 coolest people in Los Angeles”.
[www.anaphoria.com]

Etienne Deleflie is a composer and researcher who has worked in spatial audio for over a decade. His compositions have been performed in various music festivals in Australia and internationally. Etienne founded ambisonia.com, a site dedicated to the dissemination of ambisonic spatial audio recordings and compositions (the site is now hosted at the University of York). He also founded SoundofSpace.com and designed the ambisonic file format known as Universal Ambisonic (UA). His published research, and PhD thesis, is centred on the relationship between music composition and illusions of space in sound. His musings on sound and all things art can be accessed on his blog [etiennedeleflie.net]