Tag: sound-portrait

i made the first few sound portraits in the early 90s with the help of a 16bit sampler that could only store 21 seconds of digital audio in a 2MB floppy disc. this restriction allowed me to focus only on a portion of recorded speech extracted from an interview I would record with the portrait’s subject ( often a musician, a poet, or someone who works with sound ). Sound-portraits are also Tracings, but a bit different in that they use composed rhythmic stimuli put out by a computer to trigger the sampled sound stream one slice at the time from a graph that appears on the sampler’s LED screen. the abundant timbral possibilities inherent in speech are mesmerizing and including the particular intonation and pronunciation native to portrait’s the subject. these sounds emerge by manually tracing the shape of the life of the spoken word or sentence articulated as phonemes or even fractions of a phoneme. a sound-portrait is meant to be completed by the subject who performs an open written part or improvises over the soundtrack

  • Thumbnail for the post titled: (~) Tilde (´) Tilde

    (~) Tilde (´) Tilde

    Learn about the pieces I created during my 10-month-long residency at the Koubek Center in Little Havana as part of En Residencia under the title, (~) Tilde ( ‘ ) Tilde

  • Thumbnail for the post titled: Sin Ninguna Imperfección

    Sin Ninguna Imperfección

    This chamber piece for instruments ( from 1-8 ) and sound portrait, is performed over the fixed media soundtrack of Retrato: Ricardo Dal Farra. It can also be presented as a sound installation

  • Thumbnail for the post titled: Beast

    Beast

    Beast is an album of electroacoustic compositions for trombone created for and performed by the Florida based virtuoso trombonist and composer David Manson. It includes my gated sound portrait titled, Re: David

  • Thumbnail for the post titled: Subtropics Vol. 1: Breath

    Subtropics Vol. 1: Breath

    The first album of live recordings from the Subtropics Festival’s digital archives, this collection revolves around the sounds generated by breath and features performances by Robert Dick, Earle Browne, John Gibson, Needle & Sony_Mao, Thomas Buckner and Alvin Lucier, Gustavo Matamoros and Robert Gregory, and John Cage. The album was released in 2002 and was intended as a fundraiser for Subtropics Organization ( SFCA ) a nonprofit organization.