Unhinged (2011) for fixed media

I began this work as a way to teach my students how I compose electroacoustic music (and hence how they might approach composing such a work). We took an audio tour of our campus, recording interesting ambient and environmental sounds, and brought them back to the studio for analysis and exploration.

This work is derived from a short 6 second sound samples we found of an old elevator with a manual door whose closing mechanism didn’t work correctly. The malfunctioning door provided us with a loud and dramatic slam.  The sound was then processed using FFT analysis and resynthesis methods, granular processing and time-dilation , with the goal of discovering interesting microsound structures hidden within the fleeting moments we recorded. The entire work is built from thre transformation of the original sources.