Auditory Fiction II (2014)

Edmund Campion

The Auditory Fiction pieces are composed for live musicians who perform with the aid of in-ear click-tracks.  The click-tracks are designed using software tools developed at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies primarily by John MacCallum and Matt Wright with support from Ed Campion and others.  With the click-tracks in place, the musicians are enabled to play in any tempo relationship, accelerate, decelerate, change phase, and at any rate. 

Auditory Fiction II, was written for the ECO Ensemble percussionists Dan Kennedy and Loren Mach, and is scored for two simple log drums that are played in many different ways.  The piece was premiered by ECO in October, 2014 at the Venice Biennale for Music. 

The combination of acoustic musicians performing in a computer designed temporal space constitutes a fictitious world.  Where the Drumming music of Steve Reich relied on the precision and skill of the performers to achieve similar effects, Auditory Fiction relies on the marriage of the technological aid and the performance skills of the musicians.  Auditory Fiction creates a hybrid digital/analog performance space, one that tries to offer new experiences of time in music. This hybrid space of music making opens new vistas for organizing performance on acoustic instruments. The musicians become capable of performing feats of temporal magic, acts that defy our perceptual logic and encourage the ears  to hear things that are not actually present.  Outside of amplifying the instruments, there are no other electronic parts or processing in the piece. 

Edmund Campion is Professor of Music Composition at the University of California, Berkeley and Director at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies.