The Thirteen Postures
Channel: Dave Phillips
Date: 2022-06-02

Recently I read Miller Puckette's essay about Charles Dodge's well-known Speech Songs, composed in 1972. Speech Songs is a set of four short poems read by a synthesized voice and treated by various signal processing techniques, including newly developed methods for signal analysis/resynthesis with a computer. Unique audio transformations were available to the composer thanks to a hardware/software audio processing system that hadn't been designed for music composition. The modern ear may find Speech Songs to be a bit quaint and dated, but Dodge's achievement was significant not only in 1972: It is fair to say that Speech Songs is at the root of much of today's vocaloid techniques and ubiquitous autotuned vocals.

After reading Miller's encomium on Dodge's work I was inspired to return to a work of my own dating from the early 1990s. That work was essentially a series of deep transformations of a solo voice reading a historical text regarding t'ai chi ch'uan. The transformative techniques include digital implementations of classic tape manipulations, analog synthesis techniques and audio mixing methods, and the more modern possibilities of Csound. The Cool Edit software was of particular value: Much of what happens in the piece results from extracting waveforms at the micro-level of the reading and using them to create longer wave sequences. In fact, every sound heard in the piece is derived from the original monaural reading, i.e. my voice is the only source material. 

Specific techniques include but are not limited to:

  Tape-style tempo manipulation
  Reversing a sound
  Looping a sound
  Adding reverb and/or other DSP effects
  Chopping a sound into bits for arbitrary re-arrangement
  Extracting single-cycle waveforms for wavetable-like sequencing (see above)
  Time-stretching and pitch-shifting with Csound's PVOC opcode (phase vocoder)
  Cross-fading sounds for smooth transitions

By today's standards nothing there is particularly novel, but in the early 1990s I was discovering some of these procedures on my own (I imagine many others were making similar discoveries at that time). Even by then the tools employed were sophisticated and powerful, and they invited participation and experimentation. Regarding usage, I was familiar with the editing and mixing possibilities of Cool Edit, while the audio processing potential of Csound was still quite fresh (I was introduced to Csound around 1989). I was not working in real-time but the turnaround time was negligible. It was all quite exciting,

I recorded the original composition as a monaural soundfile. Alas, the original material is now lost, so the recording presented here merely processes the composition's only existing soundfile, using reverberation and mixing effects provided by a patch created in VCV Rack. The patch is very simple: A sampler module plays the original soundfile "plain" and without repeat. Two mixer channels provide an untreated mix of the original soundfile with random continuous panning. Two more mixer channels treat the same material with two separate reverberation sources and with fixed pan positions. Parameter modulation is restricted to the modulation rate and depth inputs of one reverberator. In my opinion the resulting mix has a fuller sound than the monaural original, with considerably more spatial movement. 

The original reading is from the T'ai Chi Ch'uan Ching attributed to Chang San-feng, translated in "The Essence Of T'ai Chi Ch'uan: The Literary Tradition" (Lo, Inn, Amacker, Foe; North Atlantic Books, 1979). Unlike Dodge's Speech Songs my piece is not concerned with intelligibility of the original, though certain lines are heard clearly. The treatments loosely follow the progression of the text, but considerable freedom was taken regarding placement and timing. 

It's a small group in the studio this time:

NYSTHI - Complex Simpler
Southpole Parasites - Smoke in Oliverb mode
Squinky Labs - Form
stoermelder - uMap
Valley Audio - Plateau
VCV - Audio 2, MIDI CC to CV (for simple external control)
wiqid - languor

My deepest thanks to them all. They certainly did their best with my meager material. Whatever faults are found here are definitely mine and mine alone.

Dave Phillips
30 May 2022