Search - David Dunn :: Four Electroacoustic Compositions

Composer and sound artist David Dunn was born in 1953 in San Diego, California. From 1970 to 1974 he was assistant to the American composer Harry Partch and remained active as a performer in the Harry Partch Ensemble for over a decade. He has worked in a wide variety of audio media inclusive of traditional and experimental music, installations for public exhibitions, video and film soundtracks, radio broadcasts, and bioacoustic research. 2"...with zitterings of flight released,"(in memoriam Kenneth Gaburo) was composed over an intense and continuous five-day period (including nights). While working on the piece I had in mind various images and metaphors for the drama of the spirit's separation from the body as described by a variety of shamanic and spiritual traditions. It is a memorial for my teacher Kenneth Gaburology" led him to state that he preferred knobs to terminals. Simulation 1: (Sonic Mirror) was an attempt to model a utopian project yet to be built. The original concept was conceived as a stationary cybernetic sound sculpture capable of processing acoustic data within an outdoor environment. Eventually the sculpture might function as an autonomous system structurally coupled to its surrounding environment in a manner that might allow for "learning" between components. This initial modeling was generated from a soundscape recording of the Cuyamaca Mountains of California. Wildflowers is a bit of nostalgia for the 20th century composer's search for the unique sonic and expressive attributes of electronic technology, an ideal mostly out of fashion. I wanted to compose a reclamation of the sounds of circuitry as material substance, those "sci-fi" clichés and glissandi now banished to the video game parlors. Ennoia 2 is a computer-generated composition that explores the time-domain synthesis algorithms created by Arun Chandra?s Wigout program. These algorithms generate continuously changing waveforms with unique structural behaviors over time. The resulting sounds have continuously changing interdependent parameters that are controlled by very few variables.