P.A.I.R.S is a project of UC Berkeley Graduating Senior, Andrew Rahman, and was funded by the UC Berkeley Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program (SURF). The purpose of the P.A.I.R.S. project is to capture the reverberation characteristics of historic spaces for archival and creative use.
Hypochondriasis is for chin (guqin) and live electronics. Chin is an ancient Chinese 7-string zither normally played by plucking with fingers. This piece is my first work to use electronics. For the first experiment on electronics, I choose the chin as the instrument since it’s one of the instruments I’m familiar with. However, the chin is a very personal instrument due to its soft volume and subtle timbral changes, so amplification becomes an important element and thus creates a new kind of environment, an augmented chin.
…sicut aurora procedit is the composition created by Maija Hynninen for a multidisciplinary work Pix grace – Rosin. The work was conceived by violinist Mirka Malmi, composer Maija Hynninen and aerialist Ilona Jäntti during 2013–15. Interaction between the group members was tight, each producing demo material for the rest of the group to see and discuss. The name Rosin came from the idea of rosin combining the two, violinist and aerialist. By friction rosin creates a contact surface between the bow and strings, the hands of the aerialist and the trapeze.