Simon Longo - London West Gallery 2004

Program Notes

In my work "LWG" each speaker is set to diffuse the sound, rhythmic pattern and distinctive timbre of the voice of only one person for each channel.

The listener can decide to focus its attention on a single source within the 10 channel mix using the capacity of the human ear to discriminate between sounds arriving from different directions and with time differences (HRTF).

The changes in rhythm will attract the attention of the listeners on different sound sources (speakers) within the butterfly system, the complex envelopes of the sounds will also contribute and help the detection of the direction of the sounds surces by time differences.

London West Gallery 2004 is a site specific sound exploration made to investigate possible way to transfer intentionality, mood and ideas through sound alone. The piece had been recorded and constructed on site during the London west gallery between  23-27 / 07 / 2004. (City and west Minster University ) The raw material is the sound of the voices of  each artist participating in the gallery and the voices of visitor who allowed me to record their comments.

Each artist had to answer the question of, what is behind the artworks they are exhibiting in the gallery as inspiration, research and ideas. The visitor had to express their subjective opinion and impression. My experimental work has been to extract portions of each speech recording with a particular significance taking in account the sound quality, expressivity and character of the person and create a music which is intended to retain and transmit this characteristics.

The piece has a vague resemblance with the rainfall. The piece was recorded and finished in two days, I didn’t had the time to think, therefore the resulting soundtrack have less of my inputs and are more of a natural cause-effect evolution.