HyperStella
Electroacoustic 9' 05"
1996
Excerpt1 (0 '18" 22Khz stereo Mp3 150kb)
The sound world of hyperStella has been created through the use of large scale time expansions and reductions of recorded sound, often up to 30 times the original length. The starting point was a small set of recorded words and percussion samples. The techniques of granular synthesis and phase vocoding allowed me to produce independent transformations of the samples in pitch and time. Further transformations were created through various other spectral manipulations. A large amount of material was created in this way, and some hard decisions of which sounds to keep had to be made.
Formally the piece divides roughly into two halves. The first half focuses on the expansion of time, while the second introduces highly compressed time, eventually leading to a extremely percussive and abrasive auditory assault. The rhythmic fragments in this section are themselves a product of the granular synthesis technique, applied to a large time scale.
The title of the work relates to the extremes of distance and time that exists between the stars. hyper refers to the extreme nature of the spectral transformations while stellar seemed an appropriate description of the harshly sparkling timbres.
