Temporal Attack is a piece of acousmatic music made from recordings of people’s voices saying short phrases, quotes and vocal sounds. After my work last term using subtle manipulation and layering, I was keen to explore the realms of third and remote order gestural surrogacy, making the sounds mostly or entirely unrecognisable with a coherent soundworld with elements that can be described as organic (inspired by Pamela Z’s use of vocalisations in ‘Breathing’, sci-fi, alien, electronic, robotic, alien sounds (influenced by Luigi Nono’s La Fabbrica Illuminata) with unsuspecting source material.

My overall process involved lots of experimentation with short gestures and then manipulation and layering in response to this – including further experimentation in response in response to the previous experimentation. Before long, the recurring motif of an alarm made from a short, looped cell of a vocalisation sound object emerged, used in a similar way to how Trevor Wishart recontextualises vocal gestures in a deliberately frightening way in ‘Red Bird: A Political Prisoner’s Dream’. First introduced at 0:04, this cell is a unidirectional descent transposed up and down in pitch which creates a repetitive klaxon-like sound. Another common thread throughout the piece is the sense of building tension and release, appearing at several instances throughout as a structural and thematic device. These buildups and releases were created by layering looped cells in a relatively confined frequency spectrum, followed by introducing shorter sounds that dramatically widen the frequency range before dying away. This then gave rise to the more conceptual narrative idea of the experience of a panic attack – the alarms being the buildup in tension, the explosion of extreme distress, and the rush and numbness afterwards.

The piece has a deliberate sense of narrative direction and purpose (see the buildups at 1:00, 4:01, 6:27), collage and gestural interplay (see 1:24-2:20, 4:36-6:27), and overall cohesion (see the recurring alarm motif at 0:34, 1:30, 3:24, 6:12).