It has long been considered something of a classic of American musique concrete. The recording on this CD is a new digital remastering of the original analog master. Noise Study, Tenney's first piece at Bell Labs, was inspired by the daily journey between New Jersey and Manhattan, through the Holland Tunnel and heavy New York traffic. This version is digitally reconstructed and remastered from the original analog tapes. Dialogue grew out of programs Tenney wrote for a set of pieces called Five Stochastic Studies, which, along with some studies in timbre, occupied his time at Bell Labs from 1961-1963.
Dialogue uses stochastic control over timbral, durational and pitch parameters.
It was the first piece by Tenney which made use of the computer in determining hierarchical features, and in making stochastic decisions regarding the given statistics of musical parameters for various sections. The piece is a dialogue between noise and tones. By stochastically specifying the statistical trajectories of these two types of sounds, Tenney creates a constant shifting of emphasis between them. With Phases, Tenney returned to the use of trajectories for means and ranges of parametric values, including note duration, amplitude, amplitude modulation rate and filter bandwidth, and the upper limit of frequency spectra. The shape of change for each parameter is sinusoidal, but the sinusoids are of different frequencies and phases, so that a kind of formal counterpoint is heard between the salient musical parameters of the work.