Duration – 10’05”
Recording
Notes: Life Study #3 for computer-realized sound is one of a series of my works that can be described as “aural cinema”. There are no stories or extra-musical messages in these works, but there is often a narrative sense of form which in Life Study #3 is informed by the violent aspect of much the sound material. In this work there are the sounds of a helicopter, fires burning, and machine guns that turns into a rhythmic pattern and from which nostalgic music emerges. I used a wide array of signal processing techniques to realize and shape the sounds for this work. The raw materials were mostly very short segments of recorded sounds which I then stretched, filtered and otherwise manipulated to meet the needs of the piece. The “artillery missiles”, for example, with their long trails were created from the sound of a door being slammed and the “organ” was created from a single short note played on an oboe. Life Study #3 was composed in 1995 for the Banff Center in Canada.
Richard Karpen 