FABULOUS PARIS

A Virtual Oratorio

The Division of Labour

Angel

Fabulous Paris

THE DIVISION OF LABOUR

15 variations on a sacred text.

“A workman not educated to the business could scarce make one pin a day. But one man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a
third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top. The head requires three distinct operations. To put it on is a peculiar business,
to whiten the pins another. In this manner, making a pin is divided into eighteen distinct operations, and those persons can make forty-
eight thousand pins a day.”
Adam Smith : The Wealth of Nations

Human lives become the instruments of a spectacular materialism.

1. Statement 6. Chorus 11. Perturbations

2. Imitation 7. Flecks 12. Misstatement

3. Song without words 8. Word dance I 13. Liquidation/Toll

4. Inflation 9. Compression 14. Hubbub

5. Hocket 10. Word dance II 15. Trace

with the voice of Alex Gordon

ANGEL

A woman remembers some of those inconsequential yet special experiences which define an individual life.

with the voice of Mary Smith.

FABULOUS PARIS

By the year 2010, more than 50% of the world’s population will live in cities of over a million inhabitants. Approaching that exciting yet
frightening labyrinth of information and experience which is the modern mega-city, “Fabulous Paris” is first encountered as the prize
destination on an American TV game show, but soon becomes the mysterious city of our dreams, hopes and fears.

With the voices of Neil Armstrong, President Kennedy,

Adolf Hitler and many others.

TECHNICAL NOTES

This 3-movement, secular oratorio explores our collective and individual experience of the mass industrial society in which we live,
through the medium of the human voice.

Apart from the final post-production mix of the final movement (Birmingham University Studio), ‘Fabulous Paris, the Oratorio’ was
made entirely on a PC or laptop, using the Composers Desktop Project software, either at home or (for the initial work on ‘Angel’) in
residence in Toronto.

The Division of Labour

The text describes the division of labour in a Scottish pin factory. Adam Smith was Professor of Logic at the University of Glasgow and
the text here is spoken with a Glaswegian accent. A sequence of sonic “divisions” follows.

Imitation: The text vowels are synthesized and combined with the original consonants (resonated). The material plays in canon in 2
parts, then 4, then (at the end) very many.

Song Without Words: The pitch contour of the speech is played as a sliding triad, with the original consonants superimposed,
ornamented by traffic sirens, kookaburras and starlings (the only extraneous sounds in this movement).

Inflation: Speech syllables are extended in time, through different types of time-stretching, ‘bouncing’ transformations, imitation or
rhythmic repetition.

Hocket: The syllables of the text are each time-contracted and set in a regular pulse. Eight copies are hocketed against one another,
then forced through a filter-bank of their most prominent pitches.
Chorus: The choral sonorities derive from instantaneous harmonies cut from Word Dance I. Against this, we hear vastly time-stretched
syllables, pulsated and panned.

Flecks: Isolated slices of the text are revealed, often derived from sharp cuts into the trailing edges of syllables.

Word Dance I: Irregular loops of speech material, and 'bouncing' syllables develop in an agitated rhythm.

Compression: The text, extremely time-contracted, pans around the space, sometimes emerging from a spectrally blurred and time-
stretched transformation.

Word Dance II: Syllables are looped at a regular speed, with simple polyrhythms and imitation, emphasizing the harmonic qualities of
the speech-segments.

Perturbation: Successive text elements read back and forth in time, are combined with rapidly panning individual syllables, sometimes
evolving in colour, pitch or articulation.

Permutation: The original text phrases reappear but with their syllables rearranged in meaningless sequence.

Liquidation: A dense mass of syllables from the text ‘breathes’ through two alternating tuned filters. Beneath this, the words of the text
are spectrally-traced so their most prominent partials bubble through the texture.

Toll: A sequence of syllables in descending pitch order is chosen from the text. As this falling sequence repeats, the pitches are focused
through filters tuned to each particular syllable, becoming more invasive on each repetition. A second filter is tuned to all the text
pitches. The words eventually dissolve, generating the metallic ‘peel of bells’.

Hubub: Toll continues over layers of Imitation, Song without Words, with extracts from Word Dance II, Chorus and others.

Trace: A trace of the pitch and vowel colour of the original text remains, with a faint echo of the changing rhythm of the speech in the
tremulations of the sound.

Work on this movement made possible by an AHRB Creative Arts Fellowship at the University of Birmingham Music Dept.

Angel

My aunt, Mary Smith, was a very religious woman. In the face of personal difficulty or suffering she remained irrepressibly optimistic. A
friend’s eulogy at her funeral concluded, “We shall all remember Mary Smith. She was an angel.” And this was meant to be taken
literally.

The movement originates in recordings of my aunt made by my wife some years earlier, as part of a family history project, using a
mono cassette recorder. Special processes were used to clean these recordings and isolate my aunt’s voice. The melodic contours of
the speech, and the resulting harmonic fields, were extracted and then used to synthesize accompanying materials, to define time-
changing filters applied either to the voice or to the synthesis of choir-like textures, to specify the pitch-sequence of accompanying
sounds, and so on, using software written for the purpose. A number of other detailed voice transformations are also used.

Angel was commissioned by the 2006 Deep Wireless Festival, in Toronto.

Fabulous Paris

This movement, the earliest composed, uses recordings made in many cities - the traffic tunnels of Stockholm, the Paris metro, an
amusement park in Kobe… - voices from American TV adverts and game-shows (recorded whilst working at Allen Strange’s San Jose
studio in the early 80s), traffic announcements on the California freeways (recorded, at my request, by the sound-poet Larry Wendt),
the voices of astronauts, President Kennedy, Adolf Hitler and others.

The piece aims to organise a dense web of spoken information and environmental sounds, using many software instruments, in
particular, filters tuneable to time-changing harmonies, developed specifically for this movement. It falls into 3 distinct sections, with
brief pauses between them, the 3rd section recapitulating the first but dissolving the hum of the City into the sounds of the natural
literally.

The movement originates in recordings of my aunt made by my wife some years earlier, as part of a family history project, using a
mono cassette recorder. Special processes were used to clean these recordings and isolate my aunt’s voice. The melodic contours of
the speech, and the resulting harmonic fields, were extracted and then used to synthesize accompanying materials, to define time-
changing filters applied either to the voice or to the synthesis of choir-like textures, to specify the pitch-sequence of accompanying
sounds, and so on, using software written for the purpose. A number of other detailed voice transformations are also used.

Angel was commissioned by the 2006 Deep Wireless Festival, in Toronto.

Fabulous Paris

This movement, the earliest composed, uses recordings made in many cities - the traffic tunnels of Stockholm, the Paris metro, an
amusement park in Kobe… - voices from American TV adverts and game-shows (recorded whilst working at Allen Strange’s San Jose
studio in the early 80s), traffic announcements on the California freeways (recorded, at my request, by the sound-poet Larry Wendt),
the voices of astronauts, President Kennedy, Adolf Hitler and others.

The piece aims to organise a dense web of spoken information and environmental sounds, using many software instruments, in
particular, filters tuneable to time-changing harmonies, developed specifically for this movement. It falls into 3 distinct sections, with
brief pauses between them, the 3rd section recapitulating the first but dissolving the hum of the City into the sounds of the natural
world.

Fabulous Paris was commissioned by Swedish Radio, Malmö, and the Birmingham Rumours Festival.