The basic aim of the project is to explore two main ideas that matter to me:

Examining the boundaries of a "piece" of music: questioning the idea of the sole author and finding ways to subvert the linear, sectional timeline of a typical musical performance (for example by creating transitions that merge multiple pieces by different composers in a way that introduces doubt about the start/end points and both foreshadows future material and references past events.

Presenting an argument that all musical material should be fair game for all people to work with, regardless of who owns it under current copyright law.

This project owes a huge debt to Claudia Jane Scroccaro, who was my main supervisor, as well as the whole pedagogy department at IRCAM, particularly Pierre Jodlowski, Sebastién Naves and Jean Lochard - who all directly contributed to this project in important ways.

My contribution to this concert unfolded in and around the other pieces in the concert, which were by Julie Zhu, Aida Shirazi (in close collaboration with the dance artist Stefanie Inhelder), Qingqing Teng, and Filippos Sakagian. In this case, their material was taken and used with their blessing and they were consulted about my plans for it - however, this was done mainly because we are all friends and it wouldn't have been right to misuse their material in a concert which was of such importance to all of us. They are also all due a big thank you for their generosity in agreeing to let me work with their music in this context! In general, I have no qualms about going against the wishes of other composers (and I expect others to feel free to treat me in the same way).

JavaScript, FreeSound API, printed materials

This piece involved a percussionist (Olivia Martin) hidden inside a large wooden box, painted black and placed in the centre of the room. The percussionist made sounds using some percussion instruments (esp. bass drum, thundersheet) that were with her inside this claustrophic space, as well as drawing on the inside surfaces of the box. The contents of the box, as well as its surfaces, were amplified and spatialised across 12 loudspeakers (and two transducers attached to the thundersheet) in the room. The effect was to place the audience partly imagining being inside the box, and partly distorting the reality of the space inside and outside the box.

Julie and the team decided to have the percussionist begin making sounds before the concert, while the Freed Sounds Improvisations were still going on, meaning that we had already weakened the clear boundaries around each piece by the time the concert began.

The sonic material used is an array of YouTube videos of ASMR pen scratching (as I couldn't use material that was *really* from Julie's piece because all her material was processed live). The video part (obviously) is a bunch of clips of doors, mainly from famous films and TV shows. An additional element in the video is a Coke can, which was originally going to be a larger part of the project overall but even with its reduced role it makes sense to use such an iconic trademark. It also foreshadows a red colour palette for later on the concert.

This clip was designed to hold space, and it uses a looped clip of a scene from the film Les convoyeurs attendent, with the contents behind a door chroma-keyed out and with all kinds of footage washily displayed behind it. When the production team had moved the box, the video fades down regardless of where in the video it is.

MUBU library for Max (for automated audio segmentation w/ onset-detection; and for real-time concatenative synthesis), Reaper DAW with various reverb settings: the audio part was made from loading in files, auto-segmenting them and then improvising with them laid out on a graph according to audio descriptors. The resulting tracks were then layered in Reaper and processed through different reverbs, aiming to achieve different spaces every time a door opened. The video is entirely fixed media and made in DaVinci Resolve, using the Fusion part of the software for chroma-keying some of the doors.

The beautiful central visual idea of this piece was to place the choreographer behind a canvas screen and throwing her silhouette on the screen with lighting from behind. The simple idea became way more than the sum of its parts by combining the shadows thrown from multiple light sources to abstract the body of the dancer (who was otherwise augmented only by some hair extensions). Inhelder was often a purely geometric shape, but always hinting at her human body before eventually collapsing into a much more realistic silhouette towards the en of the piece.

Shirazi's sound emerged from an exploration of a bilingual text (Persian/French, the poem of the title) which is only ever heard in fragments or cast through heavy processing.

The combined movement and sound is very abstracted (especially to somebody who has limited French and no Persian), but the effect carries the weight of the text across and there's a heavy intensity to the piece

At the end of this piece, the silent opening of the next transition appeared immediately on the closest projection screen to this piece's position in the room.

A big preoccupation for me while working on these sections was that the tone of the pieces around my transitions was mostly dark, serious and intense. I wanted to try and find a way to freshen the audience up so that they were ready for another intense piece, without seeming to make fun of any of the pieces. It's a fun challenge to try and make short, playful work that still has a kind of weight or beauty of its own (whether I succeeded or not is up to others to say!)

The dark/light contrast in the colour content of the material allowed me to play some more tricks with transparency (e.g. hiding different images in the light and shadow portions of a rabbit).

So the video here is predominantly shadow puppets, with some more "random" material creeping in which mostly foreshadows later sections. The audio is entirely derived from Aida's piece: she sent me the full audio stems (each of her sounds separately) of her piece and I was able to batch process them and use them in a kind of rudimentary musical instrument to create some improvisations. I created the video first and tried to create long tumbling whispers tied to the gestures in the video.

Similar to the Doors transition, MUBU library for Max (for automated audio segmentation w/ onset-detection; and for real-time concatenative synthesis), Reaper DAW with various reverb settings: the audio part was made from loading in files, auto-segmenting them and then improvising with them laid out on a graph according to audio descriptors. I chopped parts out of the resulting files, layering them into tumbling whispers tied to the gestures in the video.

The video is entirely fixed media and made in DaVinci Resolve, using the Fusion part of the software for the fancy chroma-key effects, as well as for the particle fog at end.

This next section is where I took over the concert for a while and stopped making small transitions between other people's work. I knew that it made sense for Filippos' piece to go last, which meant there were really only three spots for me in the programme. While it might have been more radical or cohesive for me to deal ONLY in the interstitial moments of the concert, there weren't really enough of them to allow me to make a full statement. So I began to think about other material I could steal, and my mind went back to YouTube (I had some previous unfinished work which made use of masses of YouTube clips). As prep for the project, I downloaded my entire YouTube history and extracted a bunch of 5-second clips from all the videos, which served as part of my new material. Needless to say, none of this stuff has been taken with permission.

The effect is supposed to be an overwhelming media-saturation, with content flowing by too quickly to grasp even a significant amount of the meaning, and our brains flit between picking up on patterns of colour, movement or sound, and grabbing on to salient moments in the mess. Of course there's an obvious parallel with the way we all live our digital lives (is this really THAT much more intense than Instagram??), but by placing thousands of different copyrighted videos in this context the relevance of the specific content becomes virtually nil (a point previously made in related work Peter Ablinger, among many others; although the most direct point of comparison I can think is the TV series Chuck.

Technically, the video for this section was extremely demanding and took most of the summer to work out - described below for nerds... It's the work I am proudest of from that perspective.

The audio here is derived exclusively from the video clips used, which means there is a great degree of chance in the initial sound, and a very slow (quite sculptural) mixing process to try and coax the interesting sound out of the texture.