Chora

The first version of Chora was presented outdoors at night on the Brookes campus, and had a duration of 10 min. A line of flaming torches seperated the audience from the sound sources. The torches were deliberately chosen to echo the use of fire as protection against the night. I was imagining how in earlier times people might listen enthralled but wary to the sounds of wild creatures at night, except that these creatures have a distinctly human sound, and maybe it’s our own animal nature we’re wary of.

Chora was revisited and reworked for the Soundworks 2005 festival during Cork’s Capital of Culture year. Performances occurred over four nights in Emmet Place in the centre of Cork, engaging well with the passing public. These performances were promoted by ArtTrail with the support of Cork Opera House and the Crawford Gallery.

Details

Although run from one computer, each of the six voices runs independently and outputs sound through a separate speaker. Each has four short-term memory slots that stored individual phrases, and corresponded to the four different phrases evolving through the piece. As phrases were ‘sung’ by each voice, they had the potential to mutate through the addition or deletion of notes, and changes in pitch, vowel or duration. Each time a voice ‘sang’, the phrase was passed to the listening module of each other voice, where it was analysed to find the closest match already in memory. At first, new phrase mutations automatically replaced older ones. However, as the piece continued, each voice developed a long-term memory of all sequences of pitches and vowels ‘heard’. This long-term memory was used to make decisions about whether to select or reject new phrase mutations. Because the voices could not sing and listen at the same time, and because their memory was not perfect, each voice had a different picture of past events, and would often make different decisions on accepting or rejecting new phrases.

I considered various ways of using selection, and finally decided to base the selection pressure on each voice’s experience through the piece. This seemed the least arbitrary process and more closely parallels our own aesthetic decisions, albeit in a very basic way.