Sabinium

Sabinium (2006)
for two-channel electronic sounds, with video animation by Harvey Goldman .

The inspiration for this piece is the fantasy that cultural memory may reside in even in the most quotidian of everyday phenomena, such as soap bubbles, where mythological battles and scenes are replayed constantly. Somewhere in the statistical noise of soap bubbles, is the din of battle. In creating this piece, I started by recording long takes of myself "performing" gestures with soap bubbles, as well as a blowing into a cup with a straw. I then selected some of the more complex gestures, which I hoped would help create richness in terms of levels of referentially to the original sound sources as recognizable phenomena in order that there would be a range between the sound sources presented as raw materials as being recognizable to their original states, to the sound sources presented untreated but sound more abstract, more electronic-like. Next, these sounds were spectrally convolved with sounds of warfare (working with samples of bubbles ensured a rich harmonic spectrum, which is conducive to convolution), then, these sounds were granulated and spectrally filtered and ambisonically spatialized. The granulation and spectral filtering were done with original Max/MSP patches, which were made to help facilitate the gradual change of parameters over time.

Link to watch video: http://www.kenueno.com/qt/sabinium.mov
Harvey Goldman's website is here: http://www.harveygoldman.com/