Yesterday during a short colloquium on my piece, House Taken Over, someone asked me how reverberation functions there. A very good question, and I didn't have much to say other than that it is foundational. Since reverb is undoubtedly the key to understanding the relationship between the solo flute work (Evans House) and its interactive twin (House Taken Over) I wanted to give the question some more thought. So here it is.

Conception of the piece

It's first important to note that House Taken Over, in its initial conception, was as a solo piece to be performed intact within an extraordinary environment, in this case a portable environment provided by computer processing and amplification. My program note for House Taken Over is here. [available soon]

There are many (even mostly) precedents for site-specific composition. One I especially like is Stockhausen's preparation of special performances of his works for the Jeita Caves in Lebanon, in order (among other things) to coax from these works some very specific, but otherwise unachievable, meanings

And then on the other hand, there are hymns.

The flute's direct sound is the subject (human presence), while the computer creates the space within which the subject exists

When the subject "speaks"--or in other words when the flutist plays her piece, Evans House--those sounds go out into the surrounding room. What that space is affects how what has been said carries in the air, how it resonates, what it means.

If you think about it...

for just a moment or two, it is easily seen that reverberation is, in the most physical and practical ways possible--

a bridge between past and present;

a bridge between here and there;

a bridge between self and other;

a bridge between the animate and the inanimate;

a bridge between nature and artifice.

Nature and artifice

It is the last bridge, listed above, that most powerfully governs and underlines the others: nature is associated for me with 1) the direct flute sound; 2) here; 3) now; 4) the animate, the living; 5) the self (subject). Artificial and extended reverberation associates itself for me with 1) the sound of the environment, "the house"; 2) elsewhere; 3) past & future; 4) the inanimate, the dead; 5) the other.

Artificial reverberation is thus my original processed-sound-image

So back to "naturalism" vs. "artifice." A natural sounding reverberation is a conceptual anchor, and is the norm encountered, for instance, right at the beginning of the piece. However even this reverb contains a hint of the artificiality to come, with its emphasis on the upper spectrum.

Way on the other side of this polarity is a highly artificial effect which is implemented on the last page of the piece. It's a much longer reverb at a much higher gain--but at the same time is aggressively gated, so that one hears, while the flute plays, an immediate and unnatural blooming of sustained sound together with the flute's direct signal. But, when the flute stops playing for any length of time greater than a few tenths of a second, all sound is quickly ramped down to zero--yielding packets of dense, cloudy reverb surrounding individual notes and legato phrases.

I connect this sound with the end of Cortazar's story, when the house is completely taken over by the ghosts of previous generations; and the couple runs out of the house, locking the gate (!) and throwing the keys down the sewer. (By the way, it's unclear whether this happens in reality or only in the mind of the narrator.)

Between these extremes lie a variety of resonant outgrowths, paths of artificial development undertaken by the originally naturalistic reverberation. One might first focus on the surreal concrete sounds employed, all of which are taken as sonic objects from the rich history of the house, but also reflected in some cases as fragmentary and threatening when heard by the narrator of the story:

-rapping at a door

-footsteps

-a rain shower

-coughing

-doors opening and closing

-a weeping crowd

-an woman sobbing

-a parrot squawking

-a dog barking

-glass breaking

-water running in sink

-rhythmic scrubbing

-mixing and sipping iced tea

-knitting needles

A favorite effect in this piece, and one which can be taken as emblematic of the bridging function of reverberation here, is illustrated in the following two soundclips: [available soon]

In the first the simple, mundane sound of a woman's cough is heavily reverberated, filtered and then dynamically enveloped over a long span, ending with a burst of AM processing.

The periodic repetitions of my artificially applied amplitude modulation (AM) seem to me a counterpart to the natural periodicities of many of these sounds: knocking, scrubbing, barking, footsteps, water waves, etc. In that way one bridges the sound of the present (the flute playing its solo in real time within a reverberated environment); and the past, as these various ghostly concrete sounds exist in the very wood and stone of an ancient house with many stories to tell.

The second example demonstrates use of the "frozen reverb" feature of the VST plug-in, "Ambience." When the "hold on" feature is engaged, the unit looks at a small window of current live reverberated sound, and extends it until a "hold off" command interrupts. I use this at various spots throughout the piece, especially the last section. Conceptually, I hear the effect as another form of bridging between the present, "live" world of the flute's performed solo; and the unnatural memory world of the past depicted mainly by the various concrete soundfiles. It provides for the flute an analogue to the persistence of memory depicted by the concrete sounds; bringing to mind the reverberation extending from a simple event in the far distant past--a cough or a sob, or a parrot's squawk--to the here and now.

Reverb, after all, underlines duration

All these forms take us back or forward along a line. So we have not only the cliched ghostly effect of echo and reverberation, then, but an actual temporal trail of bread crumbs--an Ariadne's thread--back to our ghosts, or Cortazar's narrator's ghosts.

"'They have taken over our section,' Irene said.

The knitting had reeled off from her hands and the yarn ran back toward the door and disappared under it. When she saw that the balls of yarn were on the other side, she dropped the knitting without looking at it.

--'Did you have time to bring anything?' I asked hopelessly.

--'No, nothing.'"

Nov. 13, 2003

Jeff Stadelman