We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Mariana

by Costas Dafnis

/

about

(Excerpt from live performance in San Francisco)

For full video, go to vimeo.com/183369957

Program Notes:

In March 2016 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released audio captured by a specially designed hydrophone which had been lowered very slowly to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, an area called Challenger Deep. The recordings revealed a surprising amount of noise both from the ocean floor and carried underwater from miles away.

This piece uses Max to process the original NOAA audio, freeze a series of tiny grains of sound (~.005 of a second) and apply a shaped envelope to them. This is looped and repeated quickly to make it resemble one continuous drone. The granularity forces the ear to isolate just a few pitches at different hierarchies, but because of the nature of organic sound the complexity of these drones can be phenomenal.

In Mariana, the singer gives voice to Tennyson’s 1830 poem of despondent isolation and hopeless abandonment by carefully listening to these drones, determining a fundamental, overtones, and timbre and following a score written intervallically relative to characteristics of the surrounding sound world. Each performance will be unique, as it is practically impossible to recreate a drone after it is passed and two singers may perceive the same drone with slightly different sonic hierarchy.

credits

released May 11, 2016
Kumiko Sakamoto, soprano

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Costas Dafnis image

Costas Dafnis San Francisco, California

contact / help

Contact Costas Dafnis

Streaming and
Download help

Report this track or account

If you like Costas Dafnis, you may also like:

Bandcamp Daily  your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

Beans joins the show to discuss his album release, "ZWAARD".

listen now