Ruben Sverre Gjertsen: Between instrument and everyday sound
Research Fellow at Grieg Academy, University of Bergen
The aim of the project is to explore multidimentional, amorphous and vague expressions arising when many aspects of the music are given more independent roles than in traditional musical writing styles. What interests me is to manoeuver within a continuum of means, where the historical sounds of the instruments are there as just one extreme within a continuum.
Decomposing sound phenomena
As a composer I have focused on instrumental works exploring overall sound phenomena formed by an ensemble, and how each instrument can contibute to this by a repertoire of new performance techniques. This language can be challenged with concrete and electroacoustic sounds.Transformations and analysis can enable fluent explorations of the transitional zones between instruments and everyday sounds.
This can question sound identities. What should characterize this music is not strong statements, but it's wide ranges of sounds and associations, activating a wide continuum. As Matthias Spahlinger puts it, omnidirectional continuity is impossible to represent in time. Neither is it possible in text as all the various aspects of the maps influence and color each other.
Most important is forming an imagination of diverse pieces of music, their repertoires of sounds, perceptions of time, by creating maps of gestural vocabulary and general sound pallettes, imagine these terrains and find methods to create them. I will start from a traditional opposition between polyphony and homophony and find approaches to explore both the horisontal and vertical aspects of the music.
Horisontal aspects
A melody is flux in time, traditionally in pitch. The melodic principle can be transferred to timbre, timbre modulation melody, spatial melody and 'melody' for all other aspects possible to modify over time. If the same musician performs contradicting melodies on different parameters, the melodies will filter each other and create obscure and vague musical gestures.
Vertical aspects
Characteristics of something is transferred onto something else through morphing, known from digital sound or image-manipulation. Morphing is possible between sounds (with various types of vocoders, cross synthesis and cross fadings, through music technology, or as inspirational models for notated compositions).
On a meta level, a sound can be 'morphed' into notation; if impulses from an everyday sound give rhythmical or harmonic progressions to an instrumental composition, or a quotation from the music history can be distorted in intonation and rhythm, to be reproduced as drops of water.
Grids
The equal tempered scale of the piano is a compromise where few intervals are 'pure'. Analysis of a tone or a noise sound will reveal completely different intervals sounding more fresh, offering a higher degree of timbral homogeneity, liberating melodics from the tension of harmonic functions and other music historical associations attached to the intervals. I have in previous works used microtones whenever possible, and wish to find further intonation patterns by analysis of acoustical sounds, from tones to noise sounds.
Work with sounds and musicians
I will collaborate with musicians specialized in new performance techniques and record instrumental fragments and any sound I find musically interesting. The sound material and experiences will be collected into a total sound palette through mapping of sound properties.
The human voice becomes an important part of the total instrumental palette, with all its possibilities and connections with everyday sounds. The singers can manoeuver flexibly between timbral phonetics, overtone singing, and understandable text collages, which can again be superposed into a buzz of voices.
Collecting and exploring the space
It is possible to surround the audience with sound through electronics and positioning of the musicians. All these aspects can best be explored in a diverse constellation: an hour sound installation for ensemble, voices and electronics, placed in a location where musicians and loudspeakers can be freely distributed throughout the entire space.