Created by Sravanti Tekumalla, originally for MUS275: Electronic Music composition.
Objects (deconstructed) is a project which stems from my love of Gertrude Stein and my interest in granular synthesis. After being exposed to the concept of granular synthesis in my Deconstructive Audio class, I wanted to explore the idea more in depth. I liked the idea of defining a soundscape through granularity, letting whomever was experiencing the piece control how "glitchy" the soundscape was.
To create this granular soundscape, my mind immediately flitted to Gertrude Stein's Objects, which I had studied in a literature class a few years back. What was unique about Objects was that Stein crafted sentences based on their phonetics, rather than the meaning of the word; what read as somewhat random words placed together on the page came to life when read out loud. To emulate a similar experience, I chose six passages, or "objects" from Stein's Objects and for each, created 1) a brief music sample and 2) an audio file of the passage being read out loud.
The music samples were created in Logic using the inbuilt instruments. I aimed for a dystopic sound, and created the samples such that they would blend with one another. For the audio files, I originally started by reading them out loud. I then thought of using my computer's text-to-speech tool and assigned a designated voice and speed of reading for each passage. Artistically, I liked the idea of an "object" (my computer) reading the passages and found that this decision also supported the soundscape I was looking to create.
This patch was created using MAX/MSP V7. To use these patches, download MAX/MSP.