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