Lipsync

‘Lipsync’ is a composition for cello, the cellist’s lips, and 6 channel live electronics, resulting in a performance within the context of electroacoustic sound art, and specifically soundscape, audiences.

The lips (+ lip sounds) and the hands (+ cello sounds) of a single performer are treated as separate nodes on a network, each having independent channels of expression. However, messaging between the two creates the possibility of interaction and exchange of control. Lipsync moves between different stages of energetic gestural activity, in which the performer is the focus of the sound environment, and calmer states in which the actions of the performer are only one element in a wider and more complex soundscape. The structure of ‘Lipsync’ is based on Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht’ (Death, that is the cool Night) which has previously been ‘set to music’ by Johannes Brahms and others.

The text of the Heine poem “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht,” is spoken by the cellist while they play.

The divided body of the performer – one part speaking the other part playing – is taken as a starting image. Various levels of synchronisation are explored, between action and speech, poetic idea and sonic image, acousmatic sound and live processing. These separate elements are fused by the guiding romantic conceit that death is a heightened and transcendent state.

The composition, performance and computer programming for this piece involves many novel features.

From a compositional point of view there is a reinterpretation of Romantic musical techniques (both structural and instrumental) in the light of contemporary acousmatic and spatial compositional practice.

From a performance point of view, it is the seamless integration of cellistic technique with speech and lip control. (Plosives act to control some of the electroacoustic processes, and the projection of cellistic material)

From a technological point of view it is the development of new programming concepts (balancing between a message based name space and a signal processing network) for centering the timing of the 6 channel sound processing around the performer.

• http://web.me.com/thomasgardner/Lipsync/...