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Curtis Roads

Point, Line, Cloud: Distinction / Digital Musics

, Curtis Roads' Award of Distinction winning composition, features granular and pulsar synthesis, methods he developed for generating sound from acoustical particles.

Curtis Roads studied music composition at California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, San Diego (B. A. Summa Cum Laude), and the University of Paris VIII (Ph.D). From 1980 to 1987 he was a researcher in computer music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then taught at the University of Naples 'Federico II,' Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, Les Ateliers UPIC (Paris), and the University of Paris VIII. Roads has been member of the first computer music jury of Prix Ars Electronica in 1987.

Roads' Award of Distinction winning composition Point, Line, Cloud features granular and pulsar synthesis, methods he developed for generating sound from acoustical particles. These microsonic particles, pinpoints of sound, remained invisible for centuries, like the quantum world of the quarks, leptons, hadrons, gluons, and bosons. Recent technological advances let composers manipulate this domain. Point, Line, Cloud is divided into four parts: Half-Life, Tenth Vortex, Eleventh Vortex, and Sculptor. Half-Life (1999) explores the birth, replication, mutation, and decay of sound particles. The composition is the fruit of a long period of experimentation with microsound. The piece is divided into two sections: Sonal atoms and granules. The first version was premiered in May 1998 in the large hall of the Australian National Academy of Music, Melbourne, with sound projection over 28 loudspeakers.

Half-life is dedicated to the memory of composer Ivan Tcherepnin. The source material for Tenth Vortex (2000) and Eleventh Vortex (2001) were created on the same evening. These consisted of granulations of a single sound file: a train of electronic impulses emitted by the Pulsar Generator program.

Curtis Roads: 'I divided the Tenth Vortex into nine sections, tuning and editing on a micro time scale. The work proceeded rapidly. I linked the sections into the final version on Christmas Eve 2000. The Eleventh Vortex called for more non-linearity in the macrostructure. I divided it in to over 80 fragments, which resulted in a more complicated compositional puzzle that took months to assemble. The Eleventh Vortex has a more idiosyncratic structure, alternating between coalescence and disintegration.'

The final part of Point, Line, Cloud is Sculptor. Curtis Roads: 'The source material of Sculptor was a monaural percussion track by the group Tortoise, sent to me for processing by John McEntire. I granulated and filtered this material, which disintegrated the beating drums into a torrent of sound particles scattered across the stereo field. I shaped the river of particle densities, squeezed and stretched the amplitudes of individual particles and particle clouds, carved connected and disconnected frequency zones, and twisted the spatial flow.'






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