2-channels electroacoustic piece

Composed at IRCAM, Paris, during Manifeste Academy, June 2015

In Place Igor Stravinsky there was this old lady, with a traditional string instrument, and a cat. She stood there the whole day, from the morning till late afternoon, obsessively playing with a bow on the open strings the same pattern over and over again. The pattern was always the same, setting a kind of droning scenario in that sunny, hot Parisian summer, and always slightly changing, over and over through hours an days.

She was always smiling.

Sometimes, she stopped for some minutes to get some rest. The repeating movement of the arm should have been quite painful after some hours. One day, she allowed me to make a recording.

That sample became the seed of a fixed media piece I had to compose for the Academie. Miroir #2 is a piece of a series in which composition through feedback-based disintegration of information is explored.

The original sample is processed through a Max/MSP vocoder external developed at IRCAM called SuperVP. Through this device, the signal is decomposed in its transient, periodic and noise parts, and then re-synthesized again, mixing these three components at different levels. The sample is then played back through loudspeakers, re-recorded through a microphone and re-processed again, in a feedback loop. The parameters controlling the resynthesis process are modulated through a set of automations pre-composed in a graphic score (composed in the Bach environment).