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

  • Orange graphic bearing the words Tilde Tilde above two geometric forms containing a white tilde and a black acute accent.

    (˜) Tilde (´) Tilde

    A portrait and spatial soundscape of Little Havana, created from voices recorded in people’s homes and the audible life of the surrounding neighborhood during a ten-month residency.

  • Aerial coastline image in brown and pale orange with swirling water patterns and the title Sin Ninguna Imperfección.

    Sin Ninguna Imperfección

    An open instrumental composition and later eight-channel installation in which independently paced sounds unfold alongside a voice portrait of Argentine composer Ricardo Dal Farra.

  • Subtropics Vol. 1: Breath CD in an open jewel case beside overlapping transparent printed sleeves.

    Subtropics Vol. 1: Breath (2002)

    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.