Program Note

Four ISIS Studies is a work of four sections composed between 2003 and 2008. Each section employs ISIS, an electroacoustic technique I developed in 2001 for converting a sound wave into a sequence of sine tones.
In Für Gimik: Vortrag über ISIS a recording of under two minutes of my voice reciting a German text about ISIS is treated by ISIS, whereby the parameters tone-prolongation, pitch shifting and interval stretching are employed in six different ways in sinusoidally curved shapes.
Eleven Steps in Staying a Kingly Dream transforms eleven fragments of Martin Luther King’s famous speech “I have a dream / that one day / this nation will rise up, / live up the true meaning of its creed – / we hold these truths to be self-evident, / that all men are created equal. / I have a dream.. / that one day on the red hills of Georgia / the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners / will they be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood.. / I have a dream”.
Untitled/Oil on Metal, Wood transforms a recording made in 2000 of the creaking door of the public library of Berlin during the International Computer Music Conference which was held there in that year. The materials mentioned in the title are a reference to the source of the creaks and offer a possible solution.
Ceci n’est pas une œuvre d’art transforms synthetic speech at four voice levels (soprano, alto, tenor and bass) reciting in a sing-song manner the title in English (“this is not a work of art”). Different fragments of this “chorale” are constantly shifted in space and time, each part independent of the other, until at the end all fragments find their proper place.
– Clarence Barlow