Study for Unhinged (2006)

I began this work as a way to teach my students how I compose electroacoustic music (and hence how they might approach composing such a work).  We took an audio tour of the LSU campus, recording interesting ambient and environmental sounds, and brought them back to the studio for analysis and exploration.

This study is derived from two short sound samples we found; one, an old squeaky door hinge from the Life Sciences building, and the other, an old elevator with a manual door whose closing mechanism didn’t work correctly, providing us with a loud and dramatic slam.  The sounds were then processed using FFT analysis and resynthesis methods, with the goal of discovering interesting microsound structures hidden within the fleeting moments we recorded.  Study for Unhinged is intended to be a movement of a larger piece, which explores the microsounds of these and other sound samples captured on the same excursion.