higher order ambisonics
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Still Life presents an integrated texture of hi and lo-fi, distant and proximate, interior and exterior sound images. The work’s primary sources consist of soundscape recordings from Gainesville, FL, vocal improvisations by mezzo-soprano Marika Schultze, and synthetic sounds made with standard methods.
Still Life represents a stylistic departure from all of my previous work, due in part to the austere presentation of source recordings. The work encapsulates my feeling of solitude as an immigrant in Oslo in 2021, after moving mid-pandemic and enduring numerous shut-downs. Solitude is evoked through a first-person aural perspective, deeply conscious in a still environment, melancholy, gradually overtaken by cathartic desires and re-imaginings of the present. The voice is solo, becoming self-aware, moving across time. I consciously avoided the post-Schaefferian tendency to barrage the listener with gestural archetypes in favor of more restrained forms, coming from a mysterious and personal confluence of presence, memory, and representation.
ROBERT SEABACK 