Piano Piano
hardware:
NeXT machine
software:
cmix,
rt
This was the last piece I completed on the grand old NeXT cube at home.
I worked on a subsequent piece using a recording of Lian on the phone
hearing the news of her brother's birth, but I never finished it. Somewhere
I still have the recordings for that piece.
The piece is a celebration of the sounds from the wonderful Steinway
piano I inherited from Alfred Hicks, my maternal grandfather. The piano
was built in 1906, and Nana and Grandpa kept it in top condition. I've
used it in a lot of pieces (and do most all of my composing on it),
but this piece was built entirely from resonances and layerings
of the sound of this terrific instrument. The singing of the
strings after a chord has been struck is sheer aural delight
for me.
I had lost my original recording of this piece. Chris Bailey
really liked it, and somehow a copy wound up (I think through Chris)
into Doug Geers' hands. He gave it to me on a CD, and I was able to
recapture it. As far as I know it has never been "presented" anywhere.
For those that enjoy this kind of information: I used a variation
of Craig Reynolds'
flocking algorithm
to generate some of the note-sequences in the middle (signal-processed)
part of the piece.