Stereo recording – 11 min.

This is a student work in which I wanted to learn how to spatialise sound in four channels inspired by John Chowning’s pioneering work Turenas. The goal here was to take a short motif, send it out and into phase twice and project the two along two perpendicular ellipses.

The computer program used at the time, Music 360, a predecessor of CSound, had one limitation that ruined the plan. Each sounding event could be counted in a NUM field which could only accept a maximum of 999. To realise my plan, I needed well over 1,000 notes. So much for a good idea.

I still made the piece with that motif and two phase iterations and the next challenge was to find a timbre for the computer instrument. The solution was, as is so often the case in my work, to be a bit anarchic. I had studied the well known article of Jean-Claude Risset’s synthesised trumpet sound. I simply turned the harmonics on their head and waited to see what would happen and what happened sounds a bit like a reverberated glockenspiel.

The motif was recycled in a later work, Cedar Tavern. 

Here is La Phase.