Central to all music is time. For over a decade, Edmund Campion has explored in his art a number of new paradigms for the control of time in music.  Auditory Fiction is a new composition that features the use of software tools developed at CNMAT, first by Matthew Wright and currently by John MacCallum and Andy Schmeder. This tool aids in the construction and management of polyphonic streams of independent, fixed or smoothly-varying tempos suitable for live performance (http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/publication/timewarp_graphical_tool_control_po...). With the new tool, seemingly impossible temporal structures enter the musical discourse of acoustic music (computers have been capable of it for years). The outcomes are surprising, controllable, and provide new avenues for challenging both the composer and the listener.

The new composition will be premiered in the upcoming Cal Performances season concert of the Zellig Ensemble on Sunday, November 7th, 2010.

In his review of Albert Bregman's seminal book Auditory Scene Analysis, David Huron states: "..Bregman suggests that music may be regarded as a sort of auditory fiction... In short, music listening may be profitably regarded as a type of scene analysis problem, with the exception that the auditory scenes are populated by a cast of mostly fictional sources."