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Sounds rise and fall, corresponding to up-and-down squiggles, in pink, green and blue on a computer screen. The taller the lines, the bigger the sound.

Part scary movie soundtrack and part sound effects extraordinaire, this piece of music used to be a taped reading of a Sherlock Holmes tale. Student composers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have used the kind of software recording engineers use to convert the voice into a new musical genre called electro-acoustic.

Electro-acoustic will meet chamber music in two free concerts of students’ new compositions on Tuesday and Wednesday (April 15-16) at 7:30 p.m. in Person Recital Hall. Stephen Anderson, D.M.A., an assistant professor of jazz studies and composition in the music department, part of the College of Arts and Sciences, had eight student composers write two new pieces of music each – one chamber and one, techno.

In the Tuesday concert, student musicians will perform the eight chamber music pieces. Also, the audience will hear four of the electro-acoustic pieces on compact disc, with one student accompanying his composition on electric bass. On Wednesday, attendees will hear the remaining four electro-acoustic compositions plus a performance by GrayCode, an electro-acoustic trio led by Joseph Butch Rovan from Brown University, a specialist in electronic music. The group is Rovan on both computer and bass clarinet, Kevin Patton on guitar and Fred Kennedy on drums.

Anderson and the UNC Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services built a new electro-acoustic studio in Hill Hall, where students use digital software and hardware to compose music in the musique concrète (concrete music) tradition.

“The composers draw upon field sounds or other sounds from everyday life,” Anderson said. “These sounds are loaded into the computer and manipulated through various software transformations, then subsequently blended together to create sound collages. The works in the student concerts are hot off the presses – they’ve all been composed within the past few months.”

Web site: http://music.unc.edu

graycode

Music department contact: Stephen Anderson, (919) 962-1039, anderssr@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589

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