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This piece was created for the 2010 Linux Audio Conference composition competition. The theme is 150 years of recording sound, to mark the anniversary of the oldest reproduced sound fragment “Au Claire de la Lune” dated from 1860:

The original 150-year old “Au Claire de la Lune” sample, found at www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php can be used as a starting point… For the composition process the use of Linux and/or open source applications is strongly encouraged and appreciated.

The composition must be accompanied by a (short) description of the work and the use of software technology.

In Moment of Clarity, I sample the 150 year old recording and create a composition based on the narrative of experimentation, exploration and discovery.

Initially hearing the sample I thought to remove the noise, at which point I realized that the noise is an essential aspect of the recording, giving it history and character.  In the piece I explore reframing the noise of the sample, i.e. as a percussive sound, or a texture.

The manipulations of the sample were written in Super Collider, and the mixing was done in Audacity.  Both pieces of software are available for free download and are open source. I thought about what compositional tools were available with the open source software that would be much more difficult to achieve, with as much freedom, in commercial software.  I found this an exciting opportunity to explore open source music apps, and push myself to learn something new.

I followed a similar stereo sound particle theme that I explored with virtual hardware in emergence_voice and live analog synths the guests/ a vision/ to this river .  In this case I was able to execute the randomness and repetition of the particles through code, rather than twisting knobs live through software or hardware.  This allowed me to slice up the sample and collage it on a larger scale, and immediately feel what differences slight parameter shifts made.

The 2010 Linux Audio Conference will be held in Utrecht from May 1st through 4th.

update: Moment of Clarity was awarded first prize in the Linux Audio Conference composition competition.  The following is an except from what the jury from FirstSounds.org (who provided the audio sample) had to say

“I’m impressed with the distinctively percussive use the composition by Kawandeep Virdee makes of the source material. It is quite effective, and very different from the strategies found in other creative works I’ve heard using phonautogram samples, so it rates highly in terms of originality. Despite the thorough transformation of the sample, it still retains enough of its original timbral character — the “noisiness” — for the source to be recognizable and meaningful.”