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Globally Speaking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2008

Trevor Wishart
Affiliation:
83 Heslington Road, York YO10 5AX, UK email: wynkyndeworde@hotmail.com

Abstract

Cheaply available high-quality digital recording equipment, and the ubiquity of computer music tools and the Internet make the creation of electroacoustic music in diverse localities, and its dissemination around the globe, extremely easy. This raises important questions about the relationship of local sound worlds and cultural experience to a potentially global audience. This quandary is examined through the compositions Globalalia (which deals explicitly with speech material from many languages) and Fabulous Paris – a virtual oratorio whcih uses speech in different ways to contrast our relationship to the local and personal with our relationship to the mass experience of the globalised mega-city. The problems in relating to both a local and a global audience are considered in relation to the composer's current project recording speech materials in local communities in the North East of England.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Wishart sound files

Text concerning the division of labour, taken from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations spoken in

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Audio 5.7 MB

Wishart sound files

One of the surprising variations generated from the original t

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Audio 11.8 MB

Wishart sound files

The ‘recapitulation’ of the original text, now incomprehensibly scrambled

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Audio 6.4 MB

Wishart sound files

The opening of the piece Angel, that forms the second movement of Fabulous Paris – a virtual

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Audio 9.5 MB

Wishart sound files

The same speaker, using the phrase ‘This is when we used to go to concerts’. Again synthetic

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Audio 7.7 MB

Wishart sound files

The same speaker: here we hear the phrase ‘She di’n’t spend years in bed; spent years in the house

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Audio 5.3 MB

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The stacked voices of traffic-accident announcements on the California freeways, which open the

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Audio 22.1 MB

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The ‘siren’ material emerging later in the movement, and finally revealing itself to be the voice of a

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Audio 8.3 MB

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The cadence two-thirds of the way through the same movement. At its end, harmonically stacked

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Audio 20.6 MB

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The ‘frame tail’ theme of Globalalia, constructed from a variety of syllabic types. These syllabic

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Audio 6.8 MB

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The frame tail recurs at intervals throughout Globalalia. This is an example of a highly timecompressed

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Audio 1.9 MB

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Another example of a recurrence of the frame tail, here with internal imitation

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Audio 8.7 MB

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An example of one of the individual ‘stories’ from Globalalia. This is based on the voices of

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Audio 22 MB

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Three sounds illustrate the special time-stretching process used inmaking Sound example 13. The

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Audio 1.3 MB

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Another example of the same process, which attempts to produce a results indistinguishable from

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Audio 1.4 MB