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Looper's Delight
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At 1:04 AM -0800 1/5/03, Chris Muir wrote: >One thing I find myself doing a fair amount in my looping is >building some sort of simple background, then copying it into all >available loops. From there I can develop each copy in a different >way, yet because they all share a common base, there is a sense of >continuity. Switching between them can still be very interesting >because even though they all started from the same root, the >development of each loop can be radically different. I use a similar generative procedure in my music and intermedia work. In the latter it tends to be rather less obvious to the audience, at least at first, but can help to unify the total experience of a piece. An early piece where this procedure was both deliberate and clear was my 1982 "Nocturne II." I made the piece specifically for a performance art venue that was very reverberant, so I took the idea of echoes and reverberation as a basis. I worked with it aurally through repetitive musical patterns and tape echo, visually through repetitive visual patterns and shadows, and metaphorically through literary and philosophical texts. For instance, I used a reading of the myth of Echo from Ovid's Metamorphoses, with two copies of the voice that started in unison and drifted slowly apart in time while they also split apart spatially and roamed around the gallery through an 8-channel speaker system. Simultaneously there was a physics demonstration of standing waves, using a giant Slinky. At another point I used the Allegory of the Cave form Plato's Republic, with four time-delayed voice tracks coming from four individual speakers. This was layered with the sound of waves breaking on a beach, while the shadows of objects that had been prominent were cast on the ceiling from a hidden light source. Perhaps the most overly loop-oriented moment came when I had two roller-skating flute players orbiting around the two audience groups while playing repetitive patterns. -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com