Wednesday 20.01.2010 22:42

Hertzquelle (50Hz source)

The piece Hertzquelle (50Hz source) reveals the very source of the ubiquitous hum of 50Hz that surrounds everyone of us, everywhere, everytime.  It can be heard from alarm clocks perturbing the nightly silence, from power adapters that are never switched off, when you touch a blank audio cable, or from badly ground-lifted amplifiers.
This is where it is all coming from, the very place where the world-wide hum originates to radiate all around the earth, tuning the world to its frequency.

The composition reveals a world of abstract sound that is embedded in our everyday sonic environment, where sound exists in a higher-dimensional minimal space of orthogonal sources.  From time to time, we’re being recalled out of the soothing abstractness into the real world of soundscapes by sudden events only to be drawn back into the abstract space parallel to our own.

The constraint chosen for the composition of Hertzquelle was to leave the temporality of the original 7 minute recording of a walk around a power station in the east of France intact, and to build on the natural dramaturgy, i.e without using cuts on the temporal scale.  However, thanks to the spectral processing tool AudioSculpt, three drones were separated out of the original recording that are remixed to reveal a surprisingly lively abstractness behind the recording.  These drones and the residual sound are used as the basis of the composition, by giving them a new dynamic profile, that moulds the piece out of the raw material like carving reveals a form hidden in a piece of wood.

The piece can be heard on http://myspace.com/xmtbf

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