Songes

Recording of Jean-Claude Risset's Songes. Songes was produced at IRCAM with a variation of the MUSIC V program. The original program, designed by Max Mathews was extended by John Gardner and Jean-Louis Richer so that it can process digitized sounds as well as synthesize sounds. The piece uses some sound materials from Mirages, a piece for 16 instruments and tape commissioned by the Donnaueschingen Festival (1978). The title suggests the dreamlike nature of adventures set on another scene: adventures from an absent, imaginary world. The identity of sound beings that sometimes escape material constraints dissolves in the continuity of textures, in the flow of deformations, displacements, liquefactions. At the beginning of the piece, the computer was used to assemble, superimpose, tile five motifs - these motifs, each lasting 2 to 5 seconds, were recorded separately by 10 instrumentalists of the Ensemble InterContemporain. In addition to the superimpositions, the instrumental sounds have undergone modifications governing in particular spatial effects. The harmonic structures of these patterns, repeated in a quasi-obsessive way, are repeated in a high harmonic fabric, then in inharmonic synthetic sounds. The components of these sounds can, depending on their temporal profile, merge into simulacra bells or dissociate into fluid textures. Inharmonic sounds merge into each other then accumulate in nested chords, which reproduce between them the frequency relations existing between their components. While the beginning of the piece was confined to the medium register, this accumulation gives rise to a crescendo filling the entire space with frequencies from low to high. The long coda keeps only the low and high frequencies. Calm returns with a long pedal of bass sounds, evoking dominant-tonic relationships, with internal animation due to variable time delays (like echoes reverberating on a moving wall). Above the bass, treble sounds widely modulated in frequency travel, following flexible curves defined mathematically and which try to reconcile degrees of a scale and continuous shifts. The original version of Songes was made for 4-track tape. Part of the room is the distribution of sounds in space. At the beginning, the quasi-instrumental sounds are presented frontally, on the stage (tracks 1 and 2), and the harmonic clouds which respond to them are presented by the rear speakers (tracks 3 and 4). The rapid movement in space of a flute sound suggests that one breaks away from material constraints and that one goes to dream. A passage of imaginary bells makes the front and the back answer each other. The following fluid textures appear to spread across the space between the speakers: this effect is caused by a modulation of the phase relationships between the channels. At the end, the high-pitched sounds, perhaps reminiscent of birds, seem to fly through space. This illusion of movement employs techniques developed by John Chowning (the sound source seems to move away if lost in the reverberation, and the frequency shifts suggest a Doppler effect): the high-pitched sounds evoke imaginary birds. On the other hand, the structuring of the sound material has taken advantage of David Wessel's programs to represent the spaces of timbre. Thus the trills which serve as a bridge between the episodes move in space: by causing timbres to follow each other, either neighboring or distant, they also describe continuous or discontinuous trajectories in the space of the timbres. Songes was recorded on the Wergo 2013-50 disc.