Heavy Metal

performances

Heavy Metal was premiered at the Randfestspiele Zepernick 2018 at the St. Annen church.

Other performances at the DEGEM concert 2018 at the HMT Leipzig and during "Quantum Music: Hannover Session" 2019 at Sprengel Museum Hannover.

Andre Bartetzki, wind gong and live-electronics

media

recording (stereo downmix) :



program notes

Like my piece SHIFT Heavy Metal is about the shifting attention in listening to sound. But whereas in SHIFT the listener itself is in charge to focus on this or that aspect of the sound, its the live electronic processing in Heavy Metal who draws the attention to various spectral regions during the performance. All sound "events" which stand out from the seemingly homogenous gong noise aren't added alien sounds - they are rather sculpted by the electronics from the slowly evolving spectrum of the sounding metal.

 

realization notes

The setup for this piece consists of a wind gong (chinese Feng-Luo), a condenser microphone for recording as well as computer, audio interface, MIDI controller and four or more loudspeakers.

At the beginning the wind gong is striked with a heavy soft mallet. This long sounding noise will be recorded by the software SuperCollider and just before the sound is completely decayed the recording starts to play backwards but extremely slowed down (time stretching). Upon this steadily rising reverted gong sound a number of multichannel spectral signal processing modules (based on FFT) are used to improvise with focussing on certain spectral regions and partials: steep band pass filters, spectral gates, tracking phase vocoder and others.