THE MUSIC

The 9 minute composition featured in the installation is a single, continuous piece of music written originally in Logic Pro and split to 9 different audio files: one for each tracked person or object in the room as well as the droning hum heard both in the headphones and over the speakers.

The low hum heard throughout the entire piece is a droning Db created on an airy pad in Logic. The entire piece is tonally centered around Db major. The piece is split into four distinct parts, each a reference to a musical idea, song, or memory that’s meant a lot to me in my time at Yale.

The first section is a nod to both “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson and “Abbey” by Mitski, two composers I look up to for their approaches to creating and use of technology. “Abbey” and the album containing it, Lush, was also a college composition project for the artist Mitski.

The second section is inspired by composer Gérard Grisey’s piece titled Partiels. Every sound you’ve ever heard has its own recipe—the ingredients being harmonic partials and how much of each of them you can hear. Grisey’s piece writes each section of the orchestra as a harmonic partial above the blaring trombones. In my piece, each person is a harmonic partial, with one note changing and returning each chord.

The two plucked basses of the third section start completely in sync, then become gradually out of phase with each other to electronically recreate the tape loop effect of Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” The two tracks have exactly the same notes and timing on first play, but one track is slightly shorter than the other and becomes more noticeable as the two are looped. The vibraphone and its moving line are a quote from Alabama Shakes’ “Sound & Color”, a song I found my first year and associate with my best friend. I added more drum kit parts to experience the space and object tracking with more percussive rather than tonal elements.

The fourth and final section is a more traditional orchestral piece. It’s a transposed excerpt from a longer work I started while studying abroad in Venice last summer. Each person and object in the room acts as an orchestral voice, and sounds from earlier on in the piece are called back. The audio files connecting the sections are recordings from my own phone: the first is of a video I took sitting on Hillhouse my first year, and the second is my family singing happy birthday to my dear Aunt Rhonda, who passed away alongside her daughter, also named Rhonda, this past year at Yale New Haven Hospital.

Creating a piece of music that tapped into all the areas I wanted to explore while being something I’m proud to share was by far the biggest challenge of this project, but every second of this piece has personal meaning.

The final composition visitors heard and its Logic Pro file: