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Three Anna Studies (III)

from CHANGE (ART 1023, 2002) by Larry Polansky

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- Study: Anna, the long and the short of it (1993)
- Four Voice Canon #9b (6:7:8:9) (“Anna Canon”) (1994)
- Study: baa baa birthday have you any star? (1995)
(Anna Diamond Polansky, Eleanor Wilson, voice)

These pieces use the voice of my daughter Anna Diamond Polansky, recorded binaurally. The third study also uses the voice of her friend Eleanor Wilson.

"Study: Anna…" uses a very short recording of a single cry, including preliminarily inhale, of Anna at age six months, in a bad mood. That sound, and portions of it, are pitch-shifted and time-stretched using an early version of Tom Erbe's Soundhack software. "Study: Anna…" first appeared on the CD "The Areal #6", Non Sequitur Recordings, 1995.

"Four Voice Canon #9" is a set of four computer-generated tape pieces made using five vocal sounds of Anna at age three. The four different versions of "Four Voice Canon #9" are each mensuration canons in the manner of my other "Four Voice Canons" (1975-present), and are composed using the computer language HMSL. HMSL generates a Csound "score," which is then used in conjunction with Soundhack to create the canon. The Csound score is for one voice only, and determines the permutation list of each voice, using a kind of "closest neighbor" algorithm. The HMSL software also specifies detailed panning, duration, and loudness information.

The mensuration canon is created with Soundhack using pitch- and time-compression. Each of the four versions of the piece is the same, except for the superparticular duration and pitch ration used for the four voices, which are: a) 4-5-6-7, b) 6-7-8-9 (the one heard on this CD), c) 8-9-10-11, and ø: the golden mean.

"Study: baa baa birthday…" uses the voices of Anna Diamond Polansky and Eleanor Wilson at around age 4 1/2. Recordings of them singing "Happy Birthday" (to each other), "Baa Baa Black Sheep," Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," and "Puff, The Magic Dragon," were morphed into each other in a wide variety of ways using my spectral mutation functions implemented in Soundhack. I was particularly interested in morphing their names, sung to each other in their renditions of "Happy Birthday." The piece was inspired by a little replacement-morph song I used to sing to my daughter: "Baa baa twinkle, have you any star, H-I-J-K, three bags are…"
Study: baa baa birthday…" first appeared on the Computer Music Journal CD, 20th Anniversary Issue, 1996.

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from CHANGE (ART 1023, 2002), released August 9, 2002

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Artifact Recordings San Francisco, California

ARTIFACT RECORDINGS is a project of Ubu, Incorporated, an artist-run, non-profit organization supporting experimental and electronic music based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our download and compact disk series is dedicated to representing a living experimental music tradition that continues to thrive in the cracks between the commercial, academic and classical music establishments. ... more

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