I Hear You. Do You? live-stream concert (2021)
"I Hear You. Do You?" is a set of music composed based on models of conversation for my Ph.D dissertation at UC Irvine.
The music calls for conversation. All participants will express their ideas in their own ways, listen rigorously and respond to each other, taking initiatives. Each one of us has a voice to express and be heard. It's when we converse, things lead to greater joy, greater possibility, greater growth and grater flow.
Ensemble featuring: Bella Pepke - cello, Blake Harrison-Lane - violin, JoVia Armstrong - percussion, and myself - piano, music & programming.
Recording: Blake Harrison-Lane, Video: Teerath Majumder, Mixing: Tomoko Ozawa, Lighting: Diana Herrera.
Cricket Wind
Phasing
Streams of Talk
Group Talk No. 1
Group Talk No. 2
Group Talk No. 3
Program Notes:
Cricket Wind
Cricket Wind is an interactive solo piano piece with the motion sensor, MUGIC®, programmed in Max for Live. The music attempts to recreate the orchestral sound-scape as a form of conversation between myself and beings in nature which I experienced in the park while in Japan in 2020. In the music, I seek connection with nature through the sound of the piano and crickets and the gestures from performance on the piano. The title Cricket Wind comes from the wind sound created by samples of crickets recorded in the Cricket Temple in Kyoto.
Phasing T
The music attempts to depict various moments of conversation using MIDI on disklavier and an interactive program by MaxMSP, emulating dialogues between two people by mirroring the input notes on the other side of axes with delay. Fixed delay times create a response in a certain amount of time, allowing the disklavier and the voice in the mirror to interact or create an effect where the disklavier is being chased or shadowed. Changing delay times would display a gradual shift in the engagement status of the two participants, the disklavier and the mirror. When the axes change, the mirror image of the voice is transposed to different places in the register, creating continuously evolving harmony. These musical moments phase in and out as the dialogue moves on.
Streams of Talk
The music illustrates conversational scenes in which whenever a speaker initiates an utterance, there is always an interruption. An interruption in a form of whisper, shout or something in the middle which is released like a stream of bullets as if whenever one tries to say something, there is always someone who tries to talk over or cannot wait for his or her turn, giving you no chance to finish your sentence or even to start saying what you actually want to say. Or it could be a series of echoes which follows you around wherever you go.
Group Talk No. 1 - 3
Group Talk is a suite of three pieces which model possible situations in conversation by a group of individuals who come from different cultural and musical backgrounds. Throughout the music, pre-composed and improvised sections interweave, which exemplify a number of conversational scenes. In the improvised sections, performers are granted with choices to select materials to play, or to improvise within the framework provided. Each scene is called, develops and advances to the next section by the sonic cues initiated by one or all of the players as they work together in the Group Talk.