'The Human Cost, Doom & Gloom, and Extensive Structure No.1', the CMC's Salon Series at the National Concert Hall, Dublin

I performed The Human Cost, Doom & Gloom, and Extensive Structure No.1 for the Contemporary Music Centre's Salon Series at the Kevin Barry Room in the National Concert Hall.

The Human Cost:
The Human Cost is a data-driven composition that further explores the impact of Ireland’s economic crash.
The aim of the piece is to express economic data through the manipulation of musical tension and release patterns. 
The Deprivation Rate, Unemployment Rate and Emigration Rate from 2007 to 2012 were used to drive three fof synthesis algorithms. As each of these economic indicators increased the perceived tension in the human vocal simulations would increase also. The outputs of each of these algorithms retain a harmonic relationship.
Algorithms 1 & 2 express the Deprivation and Unemployment rates respectively while algorithm 3 expresses the Emigration rate. The first two algorithms provide a harmonic backing for the third algorithm, which assumes the metaphor of a lead vocal instrument and so undergoes random pitch fluctuations.
An algorithm based on a heartbeat metaphor that is mapped to express the fall in GNP between 2007 and 2012. This adds a rhythmic element to the piece.

Extensive Structure: 
Motivated by Ancient Greek thinking on epistêmê and technê this piece explores the tension between composition and performance. To do this it treats musical material as an instrument in the traditional acoustic sense, and formal musical structure as the performance of that instrument.
The piece was created by first composing musical material and then re-organising that material into larger structural patterns, in effect using the musical material to perform the patterns. These patterns were informed by music composition research undertaken in the field of embodied cognitive science. The result is a constantly shifting tapestry of musical motion that feels familiar and yet alien at the same time.

It explore the tension between what philosophers refer to as epistêmê and technê. In music epistêmê is the high level theoretical knowledge and logical processes a composer draws upon to shape a piece and a listener draws upon to understand a piece. Technê is concerned with the intuitive gut feelings with which a composer crafts, and a listener enjoys, a piece regardless of theoretical sensibility.
This piece explored the role of technê in making music meaningful to a listener. It does this through a systematic application of the thought of Leonard Meyer who proposed that the manipulation of expectation patterns through the design of embodied musical gestalts creates a unique technê for the listener that lends that music its sense of meaning. 

Doom & GLoom:
Doom and Gloom is a data-driven composition that explores the human cost of Ireland’s economic crash. The piece opens on a conversational montage from Finian’s Rainbow that offers an eerily ironic foreshadowing of the bleak and desolate future looming on the horizon for an Ireland that has lost its “pot of gold”. This discussion soon falls into chaos twisting and contorting as it disintegrates into a shattered ocean of broken and jagged sound fragments. This disintegration takes place at the same rate at which the Central Statistics office measured the decline in the Irish GNP (Gross National Product).
The timbre of the maelstrom transforms as material driven by the Unemployment Rate (Central Statistics Office) arises through the cracks between each sound shard. These new sound shards slowly reintegrate in time with the data contour to resolve in a young man’s discussion of his experience of unemployment in the post-Celtic Tiger years.
The piece is realized using FOG synthesis techniques (an extension of “fonctions d'onde formantique” to sound file granulation) and is intended to highlight the suffering caused by Ireland's economic crash through a mixed methods approach based on the sonification of economic data by compositional techniques.