John Oswald’s plunderphonic works (his term has become a category in the Ars Electronica mandate) span the transition from the analog to the digital era in sound; and many of his pieces transcend the distinctions, or blur the necessity of specifying one realm or the other. But the majority of his work in this genre focuses on the re-organization of units of sound in time. Digitalization has allowed him to work with a far greater degree of refinement and complexity. Oswald’s record company, Fony, has released his retrospective box set which also contains several excerpts from two more recent projects.

The idea for this was a ballet with 12 sections, each of which was a different plunderphonic or rascali klepitoire taking on the various obsessions of Glenn Gould. Oswald had a computer listen, via pitch detection software, to a recording of Gould performing the “Aria” of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The computer played back its interpretation using samples of the notes Oswald recorded from an actual Gouldian piano. The composer then worked with Ernest Cholakis to make a complement to his earlier piece. This time, instead of an embellished transformation, the piece is an accurate-to-the-millisecond and dynamically precise MIDI mapping of the same recording. The recording can now be played back with a real piano or via samples: Cholakis has mapped each note in the original piano and created a profile which compensates for the coloring in the original recording.

Oswald was also able to make simple transformations of the performance such as the inversion Invaria.

These new versions omit Gould’s prominent vocalizations which were part of the original recording. Oswald was able to isolate these vocalizations to the extent that an accurate transcription could be made, which he returned to the analog realm by creating Ariature, a vocal score (performed alternately by vocal clones Christopher and Benjamin Butterfield) with an accompanying orchestration.

In 2003, Oswald created a stage work, a solo dance opera lecture of plunderphonic pieces called Spinvolver, in which the lines between performer and machine auralization were constantly obfuscated. The piece Boom is an excerpt from Spinvolver and an example of two simple digital techniques.