event horizon (2025)
digital media
continuity -> suspension -> collapse -> transmutation
A recent study in ambient and post-digital aesthetics, integrating instrumental and synthesized sounds via bespoke digital processes in Max.
Sources include:
SOMA Pulsar-23 synthesizer
electric guitar impro (Robert Seaback)
flute impro (Alessandra Rombolà)
World Within One Step (2023)
flute, piccolo, live processing & electronic sound
Video excerpts performed by Alessandra Rombolà at Ultima Festival 2023, Oslo, NO
Conceptually, World Within One Step is about finding a world within a world—about complexity observed in spaces already conceived as singular or elementary units, hinting at the limited scale of human perception. Small, repetitive gestures undergo constant changes in inflection and shade. Subtle movements in pitch unfold and blossom into new sonorities. A parallel world appears to exist below our level of sensibility and control. The title is also suggestive of a near-immediate encounter with something vast, immersive, and possibly unknown.
The files below are the original graphic score and the performance revisions made by Alessandra Rombolà after workshopping the piece in the weeks leading up to the premiere.
A more in-depth discussion of World Within One Step can be found in section 4.5 (beginning at paragraph four) of my Research Catalogue Exposition titled Embodied/Encoded: A Study of Presence in Digital Music, published by the Norwegian Academy of Music.
Still Life (2021)
higher order ambisonics
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.
Still Life received the Gold Award in the computer music category of the 2021 Student 3D Audio Production Competition, sponsored by IEM & VDT.
Additional information about algorithmic and spatial audio production strategies in the piece Still Life can be found in the Sounding Future article, “Practical and Poetic Spaces in Still Life.”
In addition to the mastered stereo version above, the track can be heard in binaural formats for immersive headphone listening on the Sounding Future 3D Audio Space.
Skin and Siren (2022)
higher order ambisonics
What layers of meaning remain when the transparency of a sound recording is intentionally stripped away? Skin and Siren poses a response to this question in its treatment of recordings from percussionist Ingar Zach and field recordings made in Oslo in the Spring of 2022.
The work presents dreamlike passages alternating between the corporeal residue of performance (Zach) and a fractured city soundscape. Filtered and pitch-shifted resonances from the snare drum and timpani create a harmonic frame for much of the work in addition to resonances extracted from bells ringing at Oslo City Hall.
Skin and Siren is about finding beauty in absolute chaos, and losing yourself in a moment by becoming present in the transcendental meditative sense. Rather than presenting sound sources is raw states, I found that my digital transformations highlighted the ephemera of the scenes, like the tactility of small impulses and emergence of tonal shades. Between periods of being swept away by such fragmented pictures, one encounters concentrated, powerful sonic totalities of high contrast—encapsulating the way that time implodes in moments of becoming present and expands into vast spaces of mind and body.
ROBERT SEABACK 