8 CHANNELS INTERACTIVE ELECTRONIC-ACCOUSTIC MUSIC
For flute, virtual Gu-Zheng and ChucK
Composer: Hsiao, Yung-Shen
Flute: Gina
Windy Hill Open Space Preserve is a regional park located in San Mateo County, California. On 2007 Christmas Eve, my friend and I decided to go to the Windy Hill for hiking. On top of the windy hill, we can overview the entire bay area and Stanford campus, and all the view and fierce wind were coming from all directions. We can felt and heard sound of wind all around us, as if all kinds of nature sounds were mixed and spatialized. That was a special experience for me. The music idea is to create a spatial realm, in which the windy sound, created by both tape and live flute, initiates the piece. Real-time interactive effects work as echoes from the mountain, which are spatialized into 8 channels. The panning system is designed to present a big “circle of stereo,” instead of moving sounds rapidly between different speakers. Sound sources were drawn from samples of pre-recorded Chinese Gu-Zheng and flute, which were transformed and mixed in different ways to create a slow process of sonic changes in time.