Works » By Title » E » Emerald Soft (11:03 / 1986)

Last fall while in Sweden, Max Matthews asked me why it was that most electronic pieces were or had to be loud. Apart from an obvious answer pertaining to many composers' desire to fill space with lots of sound, it also struck me that perhaps for technical reasons (e.g. signal-to-noise ratios and dynamic range), saturating an electroacoustic space with as much signal as possible played a significant role. The discussion with Max left a residue about my own work and generated questions which I am presently trying to answer in the form of criteria by which softer, texturally transparent yet convincing electroacoustic works might be produced. Emerald Soft is a work assembled using MIDI data to drive a set of Yamaha DX and TX sound modules. A pulse pattern program generates rhythms and tempi which branch into sub-patterns based on assessing flag states associated with a group of timbres sent back from the synthesis equipment. A density function limits the amount of simultaneous information (ie polyphony). A MIDI-controllable reverberator is utilized to establish different spatial imaging perspectives.