"Into Darkness"

The Ohio State University School of Music SOUND SYNTHESIS STUDIOS is a center for research and composition in computer music. Founded in the early 1960's, the studios consist of a network of Unix (DecStation 5000/200, NeXT, Sun) and Macintosh computers, with over 8 gigabytes of disk storage. OSU SSS was the host of the 1989 International Computer Music Conference. Thomas Wells is the Director of the Ohio State University Sound Synthesis Studios.


21st is proud to bring its readers a short excerpt of Professor Thomas Wells award winning composition, "Into Darkness. According to Wells, "My basic idea was to create an entire work from spectral manipulation of vocal sounds, using techniques of spectral interpolation, compression, and expansion. The primary sound source in this work is an excerpt from Don Carlo Gesualdo's Tenebrae, recorded by the Hilliard Ensemble, and used by permission of ECM Records. The music is dark in mood, befitting the text and the style of Gesualdo's vocal setting.

The 60" excerpt on which the entire work is based was transferred directly from CD to hard disk using an Audio Digital Systems AES/EBU/SCSI interface developed at The Ohio State University under a National Endowment for the Arts Centers for New Music Resources Grant. The recorded material was processed using phase-vocoder-based spectral modification programs written by Christopher Penrose, Eric Lyon, and myself -- programs to perform timbral interpolation, spectral expansion, compression, and inversion.

These programs run on a NeXT 040 Cube in the Ohio State University Sound Synthesis Studios. The IRCAM Super Phase Vocoder, running on a DECStation 5000/200 was employed in this work for time expansion, and the Mark Dolson phase vocoder, running on a SUN 3/280 was used to provide analysis files for manipulation using cmusic scripts. Linear prediction was used, albeit very sparingly, using the mxv application, written by Doug Scott, and running on the NeXT 040 Cube. Timbral interpolations were made between different excerpts of the Gesualdo samples, as well as between Gesualdo samples and software-synthesis produced sounds (made using FM, waveshaping, granular synthesis, and resonant-filter synthesis). The spectral modification techniques were applied, for the most part, successively, in order to achieve a desired timbral richness, and to distance the material somewhat from the original patterns and inflections of the Gesualdo. Mixing was done with the Lansky/Dickie rt application.

The recording was made on a Sony PCM-2500 DAT, recording directly digitally from the Audio Digital Systems interface.