Natural Language (2003)
Mezzo-soprano and video
3:47
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Program Notes
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Natural Language is a hybridized extension and fusion of Art, Music and Voice. It is the result of collaboration between artist Sue Hettmansperger, composer Lawrence Fritts and mezzo-soprano Katherine Eberle. The piece began with the idea of Eberle singing a live duet with an electronically manipulated recording of her voice, accompanied by a scanned painting in a digital duet with itself, all mediated through electronic composition. The painting, entitled “Chimera” (an imagined hybridization of the vocal tract fused with botanical imagery,) was scanned into the computer and animated over time. The resulting image unfolds in a pictorial space whose internal rationale changes and shifts before our eyes. It is as though the form travels through a topologically stretched or folded space, differentiating its shape in accordance with changing unseen mathematical parameters. This permeability of form mirrors both digital and genetic manipulation, where boundaries between organisms are increasingly blurred. Collaborating across disciplines, we explored the fundamental congruencies of artistic expression visually, musically and linguistically. The building blocks of language and sound, or phonemes, consist of percussive sounds produced with tongue, lips or teeth as a basis for rhythmic theme. Recorded in an anechoic chamber, improvisations in speech and song were transformed into a vocal accompaniment that is played while Eberle sings during the performance. Fritts used the principles of Claude Shannnon’s Information Theory, devising algorithms to create a stream of “esses” and a Markov Chain to model natural language. The work reflects an interest in the morphology of organic form and the complex relationship of musical and visual creative languages, as they explore the continuum between physical presence and digital worlds.
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Downloads: Quicktime Movie
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