The Rose Village (1998)
an electroacoustic soundtrack to a silent film by Don Whitfield

performance materials are available on request

needed:
video playback from either DVD or computer (quicktime)

full recording:

The Rose Village

Program Notes:
The Rose Village is an electro-acoustic soundtrack to a digital video. In the video, I began with a digitized version of a short black & white 16mm film by Don Whitfield which portrays an automaton awakening into a vibrant young woman through contact with the physical and intellectual world. By extensively re-editing, layering, filtering and quickly superimposing images, I’ve tried to create the sensation of a pentimento. In oil painting, pentimento is an accidental form created over time as the top layer of paint begins to fade, partially revealing images previously painted on the canvas. Like almost forgotten memories, these images reappear, and create a swirl of unexpected juxtapositions. As Lillian Helman described a pentimento, “a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.”

Similarly, the construction of the soundtrack began with a recording of a recitation of a work with an autonomous structure and narrative, Pamela Barrie’s poem “The Rose Village.” This sonic material was extensively edited and reassembled, filtered through the acoustics of a variety of physical spaces, and processed using a Kyma/Capybara system, Max/MSP, and the usual Macintosh DSP software suspects. The desired effect is similar to the image track. Fragments of the original text float through a complex texture of (derived) sound, occasionally rising to the surface, but often lingering just at the edge of audibility.

The audio and image tracks are loosely coupled, joined through shared themes but synchronized in a decidedly non-diegetic manner. In fact, each has its own narrative, and meanings reside not only in the structure of each, but in their competition as one covers then other, and then reemerges, struggling for your attention. Both the audio (through the recited poem and its musical treatment) and the video tracks address the motifs of memory and growth, restoration and infinite regression.

This piece is for my wife Nancy.

Performance History

Nov. 8, 1998
University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA)

1999
International Computer Music Festival (Kobe, Japan)
Society for Electroacoustic Music in the US (SEAMUS), National Conference (San Jose, CA)
Next Wave Festival (Melbourne, Australia)
Video-Salon, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (Milwaukee, WI)

2000
Bytes of Art Festival @ YLEM: Artists Using Science & Technology (San Francisco, CA)
En-Red O 2000 — Electric Songs (Barcelona, Spain)
Matthews Galler, University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Scotland)

2005
Winner
NSF/Chicago Materials Research Center S3 Project: Sounds and Sights of Science