Investigating the Impact of Electroacoustic Music in Greek Culture, through a Portfolio of Electroacoustic Music Works which Explore Religious and Mythological Aspects of Greece.
My research explored how different electroacoustic music compositional methods can be used in three acousmatic compositions based on religious and mythological aspects of Greek culture.
[Table 1] provides the links corresponding to my compositions.
Icarus was a character in Greek mythology, in the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. It includes soundworlds of airplanes recorded at Manchester Airport, as well as stone sounds recorded in the studio.
Sounds captured in the interior and the exterior of a Greek Orthodox Church are included in Time Travel.
The mythological adventures of Ulysses in the Land of the Sirens, as described by Homer in The Odyssey, are the inspiration for Land of the Sirens. Sound samples from the floghera, a traditional Greek instrument, were also recorded and used throughout the work.
The composition of these works addressed the following research questions:
1. How can variations of real-world source sound materials be transformed into new identities?
2. How can the combination of various textural attributes, which are present in different overlapped textural layers, lead to the perception of new aspects of gestural motion [1] or new ways of identifying specific soundworlds? What effect might this perception have on soundworlds associated with specific aspects of Greek culture?
3. How might the concept of “cultural identity” be expanded in an acousmatic work?
[1] Denis Smalley, "Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes", Organised Sound, 2.2 (1997), 107–126 (114). Several other terms from Smalley’s 1997 article are used throughout the presentation.