Morphosis

Morphosis (1992) is a piece composed by the author using the synthesis system described in this thesis. All the sounds were sculpted either from scratch, or from manipulation of short recorded acoustic sounds. The mixing for this piece was done using Csound[49]. Morphosis is a timbre melody (Klangfarbenmelodie), but it is not as subtle as Schoenberg had imagined (see page ). The structure of the piece is based on simple geometrical shapes. The form of a triangle, which stands for the tonal form of ``resolution -- tension -- resolution'', is repeated in different scales in fairly symmetrical ways. The piece last about 4'20". The ending sound starts at 4'00". The shape of the piece is an isosceles triangle, with its highest point at 2'00". Four shapes starting from an isosceles interpolated to a right angle triangle form the first 2 minutes. The last two minutes is constructed by a large right angle triangle and a smaller one superimposed on top of it.

The piece starts with a quick build-up of a metallic sound which fades away to a sinusoid at 150 Hz through a noisy timbre. The sinusoid spawns other sinusoids which first drop in frequency and then rise to one of the first 5 harmonics of 700 Hz (700-3500 Hz) while fading away. The complex tones turn into a looped melody of a pitched female voice at 700 Hz. This voice spawns transposed copies of itself, where the transposition is done according to an exponential curve. The voices alternately rise or fall in pitch toward a full step higher or lower than the last spawned melody respectively. The effect is that not only the melody of every individual line is heard, but also a new melody is created by the interaction of transposed copies with each other. The same process is repeated 10 seconds later for a male voice three octaves lower. A percussive sound created from stretching the male voice enters 10 seconds later to create a sense of urgency and the sounds die down slowly.

The same male and female voices were used in a 20 to 1 time segmentation synthesis for the next opening sound, which sounds like a noisy "woosh" from which sounds of birds emerged. The spatialization effect at this moment was created by Csound. The bird songs drop in pitch while slowing down and turning into the male and female voices in the left and right channel. The voices are modulated with sinusoids at frequency of 0.1 Hz exponentially rising to 1000 Hz. The modulating signals are 90 degrees out-of-phase to create a movement in space. Meanwhile a metallic electronic sound, which goes through a few iterations of being timbral and becoming rhythmical and vice versa, is faded in. The sound creates a very clear and urgent need for resolution at 2' 00". The sound is resolved by an explosion from which a texture of falling piano notes emerges. The downward path is interrupted by many slashes of high frequency lines entering quickly one after the other, whose ensemble is pointing downward. A voice reading a sentence slowly emerges while the piano textures slowly turn into individual notes. The words of the voice become clear while creating a rhythmic texture. The muddy low frequency sound of a cello, which has been there since the explosion, can now be heard. The form of this sound is the same as that of the piano texture but with exactly half as many note attacks. The words fade away to single sentences while the background (piano and cello) is amplified. Another metallic sound fades in creating accelerating pulses of sounds, while geometrically-related partials are faded in one by one in the high spectrum. The pulses and the partials meet while fading away, from which the cello and piano timbre emerge and end the piece.

The main theme of the piece is the sense of tension and need for resolution built up over the first 2 minutes, and the connection to the dénouement in the second half created by voices falling in pitch. This piece was composed for and dedicated with much love to Isabella Khan.