kitchen studies

fixed media, stereo (2016, 10'35'')
PP (concert version): IEM Graz, Open CUBE, 2018-04-10

Sound examples

parts 1-6

kitchen studies (all)

Work description

The piece reflects a further attempt to investigate the fascinating and vastly still undiscovered areas of granular synthesis. I composed it after several mixed pieces, where instrumental sounds and playing techniques provided a starting point for granular textures (Lokale Orbits). In these, the variety of resulting sounds, at least to a large extent, was rooted in the variety of source sounds, which I had recorded with collaborating musicians.
Subsequently, I decided to explore more refined technical possibilities of granular synthesis itself: within the SuperCollider language, I developed the class PbindFx, which allows defining a sequencing of arbitrary effects and effect graphs on per-grain base. The condensed syntax for this purpose rests on SuperCollider's powerful framework of pattern. kitchen studies is also an artistic research project and a didactical effort that I extended in several steps: PbindFx and the single kitchen sound of five seconds, from which the whole piece is emerging, are already part of the SC extension library miSCellaneous. For version 0.15 I've added the commented source code, which produced the six parts of kitchen studies. In these, I restricted myself to the combination respectively sequencing of one or two effects at maximum within one code example: comb delay and delay modulation (1), rectangular comb by FFT (2), resampling (3), spectral complements by FFT (4), frequency shift with feedback (5) and bandpass filtering (6). The resulting audio has only been cut and slightly mastered with a bit of equalization. The artistic research database Research Catalogue contains further documentation (see here).