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 (Smalley, 1997, p.112, Blackburn, 2010, pp.1-7), 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 (see Fig.1/0:34, 1:30, 3:24, 6:12) 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 (see Fig.2/1:00, 4:01, 6:27). 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.

A challenge I encountered in my process was a lack of dynamism and gestural interplay in places. Often, after a buildup and release, the texture would regress into a static sections – not quite true drone music, and not quite acousmatic – for example, section Fig.3/1:24-2:20 and 4:36-6:27 required extensive panning and volume automation and tremolo effects to ensure different sounds moved between the background and the foreground of the texture, highlighting different parts of the frequency spectrum. Another challenge I had was with an excessive reliance on midrange frequencies for large parts of the piece, partly down to the limited frequency range of the vocal source material. To ensure a more balanced frequency spectrum, I used effects including high- and low-cut filters, flextime, vocal transformer and ringshifter to alter pitch content, especially evident in Fig.4/0:04-1:00 (midrange ‘alarm’ on track 14 with ringshifter effect on track 13 sitting above in the frequency spectrum) and Fig.5/4:10-4:25 (pitch-shifted drone on track 26 sitting above track 27’s vocal gesture pitched down with a granulator).

I feel that overall my piece is a successful exploration of the concept of spectromorphology (Smalley, 1997, p.107), and deeply listening to the innate spectral properties of sound, collaging them into a dynamic, constantly evolving piece. My 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).