Music, Multimedia, and Technology

Welcome! My name is Eli Stine and I'm a composer, programmer, and media designer. I'm currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition & Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia, after getting degrees in Computer Science and Technology In Music And Related Arts at Oberlin College and Conservatory. I'm using this blog to talk about my work, research, and the work and research of others in the fields of music, multimedia, and technology.

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This tumblr is dead, but I’m going to keep it around so I still have the username... Happy 2018!

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String Quartet + Electronics

Working on SQ+Electronics piece for JACK Quartet.

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Transference @ Third Practice Festival 2015

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Playing with 4 Leap Motion Controller instruments I made to demonstrate electronic music to a middle school group.

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smallstep Album

What does musical activism mean to me?

In the middle of August of this summer I quickly completed a 30 minute album titled “smallstep”. The work is accompanied by a booklet designed by myself that explains the concepts behind each of the tracks and their source material (what recordings, pieces of music, and software I used to create the tracks).

You can listen here, and download for free here.

smallstep by smallstep

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New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival

This week I’m staying in New York City for the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF). My piece Ring | Axle | Gear was broken into three parts (as I suggested) and programmed on 3 concerts (Tuesday afternoon, Friday afternoon, and Sunday evening). The quality of pieces in yesterday’s concerts was quite good, so hope that that trend continues. Also hoping to catch concerts and events outside of the NYCEMF while I’m here.

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Sonic Arts Workshop

This week I’m in Oberlin for the Sonic Arts Workshop (SAW), a week-long, intensive electronic music workshop for high school students. The high school students this year have come from all over the US, including both coasts and Hawaii, and there is also one student who came from China. This is my third time teaching the workshop. I’m teaching a variety of classes ranging from microphone techniques, spectral processing, and audio programming. It’s a joy to work with such a variety of students in a nurturing and open environment.

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Computer Music

Computer Music is an audio-visual installation that visualizes and sonifies computer processes.

The sonic component of the work is a mapping of the amount of memory used by and running time of the 100 most recent system processes onto the range of human hearing.

The visual component of the work takes the same data and displays it horizontally as a sequence of bars (with most recent processes on the left). Older and larger processes are displayed as brighter colors.

The installation is “performed” by the opening and closing of programs on the computer, with or without the intervention of a human user.

The goal of this work is two-fold: first, to bring the usually “silent”, backgrounded, computer processes people interact with everyday into a very perceptible, foregrounded, domain, and secondly, to do this in a way that reveals the beauty of these processes and how computer systems handle them.

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Trombone Quartet

Over this summer I composed a trombone quartet titled “Acceptance” for the 2015 Third Coast Trombone Retreat. Here’s a video including a computer-generated recording and the score for the piece:

Update: Here's the performance at the Trombone Retreat, quite well-played:

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Niklas Roy

Niklas Roy is a self-proclaimed “inventor of useless things” from Berlin, but also an installation artist, robotics builder, and multimedia artist. The “inventor of useless things” description highlights the fact that a great deal of Roy’s work takes the engineering prowess and abilities needed for “useful” things and places them within the domain of art.

Roy’s work explores or redefines the boundaries between the real world (the world within which installation participants exist), the mechanical world (the physical materials of the installation), and the virtual, frequently digital world (the procedures and code that make the installation function). Roy's installations often have an activist or humorous bent: exploring ideas of human’s relationships to virtual spaces, video games, art, privacy, energy usage, and more. Roy is also very open about his work, more often than not including source code or detailed descriptions of how things function in his projects.

The first work of Roy’s that I came across was My Little Piece of Privacy. This work involves a small curtain on a storefront window that moves left and right, in sync with people walking by on the street, actively blocking their gaze into the storefront. 

A contrasting work of Roy’s is Lumenoise, a fabricated “light pen which turns your old CRT-TV into an audiovisual synthesizer”. The result is a strange and wonderful instrument, with notably interesting visual patterns.

A work that I feel really epitomizes the tripartite exploration of participatory, mechanical, and digital space (this time only alluded to) is Pongmechanik, an electromechanical version of the early video game Pong.

Lastly, much of Roy's recent work has focused on the use of multitudes of small balls in tubes, including the Pneumatic Sponge Ball Accelerator, a nod to the Large Hadron Collider, and an installation at the Goethe-Institut Krakau:

Roy's creative fluidity within the fields of engineering, robotics, and visual and sonic arts is very inspiring.

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Splinters

This last year I responded to a call for works from the Parvenue Duo, a group consisting of Megan Kyle, oboe, (a classmate of mine at Oberlin) and Katie Weissman, cello, based in Buffalo, NY. The piece I composed for oboe, cello, and live electronics ended up being called Splinters.

This was my first venture into live electronics for performers other than myself (and was followed by Trio, described in this blog post) The live interaction is limited but effective. Any time that I was able to use fixed electronics (i.e. sound files) I did, but at three points in the piece the performer’s live input is recorded and granulated into clouds, creating chordal accompaniment from a monophonic sound source.

First use of live-granulation in _Splinters _(cue 7)

The piece has a number of different textures and relationships between the instruments and electronics, as can be heard below in a read through recording done by Kevin Davis and Lindsay Scattergood-Keepper. The work will be performed in Buffalo, NY and recorded by the Parvenue Duo in the fall.

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Trio

This past year I was commissioned by Ben Roidl-Ward and Tim Daniels, fantastic bassoonist and oboist, respectively, to create a piece for oboe, bassoon, percussion and live electronics. After many rewrites I ended up with a short, five section piece that includes a variety of textures and instrumental roles.

The first movement begins with chaos: each of the performers quickly playing improvised notes covering their entire range while the electronics sample and randomly repeat segments of this texture. Over a minute, the range of the notes is collapsed to the middle and the notes get longer (with the percussion “lengthening” notes through trills).

The next movement begins in unison, with long tones in the middle range accented by the percussion. The notes speed up and the percussion starts filling in the space within and in between the notes, leading to the third section, a percussion solo that reiterates and develops some of the gestures heard previously in the piece.

The percussion solo loses steam and leads to a repeated ostinato pattern. The winds enter on improvised, soloistic material over the percussion ostinato, which is developed and ornamented. Finally, the winds reach the peak and trough of their ranges, respectively, and the percussion is cued to play a final, highly ornamented gesture.

The last section opens with a loop in the percussion, to which is added a loop in the oboe, and then one in bassoon. The loops are harmonically ambiguous and of different lengths. The loops circulate for around 20 seconds and are then abruptly cut off, ending the work.

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To Spring: Charlottesville

As part of the Revel at IX event used to raise money for The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative I created a 15 minute video art loop (no sound) that was played all night during the after party.

To create the video I spent several weeks shooting footage at a variety of locations in Charlottesville at different times of the day. I then compiled the footage so that they made the following transitions during the duration of the piece:

Nature -> Architecture -> Urban

Morning -> Night

Intimate -> Public

Next, I matted all of the videos using a 5x5 grid of squares with a rising and falling “echo effect” that changes the number of visible squares on the screen from one to twenty and back again. The patterns vary from left to right, up to down, and a variety of different diagonal configurations.

This project was both my first foray into video art without sound and I also learned a great deal about Charlottesville: its nature and urban landscape.

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Peak for duo percussion

Last year I made this blog post about my work Peak for solo percussion. As part of the Meehan/Perkins Duo coming to University of Virginia I rewrote the piece for duo percussion, which I think made it much more effective. Analysis of the piece can be found in the first blog post.

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Electroacoustic Music for Dance

This year I worked with dancer and choreographer Juliana Garber on music for 2 dance works she choreographed. The first was a solo piece titled Impulse that was premiered at the 2nd Biomorphic Dance Festival at The Secret Theater in New York City.

This work blends processed acapella samples, foley recordings, and sounds of New York City into a variety of frequently rhythmic, driving textures. The climax of the piece introduces instrumental sounds and unprocessed vocals.

The second piece extended both dance ideas and sonic material from the first, and was titled Impetus+. This work is for 6 dancers and is longer, at 12 minutes.

With more dancers I felt that I had more ability to utilize dramatic gestures, and because of the more substantial length of the work more transformational processes on the musical material occur. This piece was performed at The Greene Space in Queens, in the 3rd Biomorphic Dance Festival at the Hudson Guild Theater, and at Movement Research in Manhattan.

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Memory, Decay, & Activism: William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops

This semester, as part of Matthew Burtner’s “Musical Materials of Activism” class, I wrote a short analysis paper on William Basinski’s 2002 work The Disintegration Loops.

The Disintegration Loops consists of two pieces, d|p 1.1 and d|p 2.1, which were created by playing tape loops made by Basinski over extended periods of time on tape players. Due to dust in the tape heads of the tape players the loops naturally disintegrated during that time, and the result of this process was recorded onto a CD recorder. The program notes of The Disintegration Loops read “This music is dedicated to the memory of those who perished as a result of the atrocities of September 11th, 2001, and to my dear Uncle Shelley.”

In the paper I view The Disintegration Loops through many different lenses, including tape loop music, musical re-purposing, auto-destructive art, and elegiac music. I start by analyzing the sonic content of d|p 1.1: the 2 melodic voices it is made of and the additive and subtractive effects of disintegration. I then compare it to other tape music works by Reich and Eno. Next I put it within the context of auto-destructive art (after Gustav Metzger) and juxtapose it with I Am Sitting In A Room and the glitch music of Oval. Lastly I contrast it with Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Adams’ On The Transmigration of Souls, elegies that I believe primarily take advantage of collective memory, rather than personal memory as The Disintegration Loops does. 

Ultimately, in The Disintegration Loops and specifically d|p 1.1, Basinski has created a work of art where not only the characteristics of the work, but the medium of production (the recording of tape player disintegration) and the context of production themselves are born from the catastrophic event it is referencing. In other words, Basinski’s personal experience of the destruction of the World Trade Center, a seemingly immovable marvel of technology disintegrated into rubble, has bled into the composer’s practice, and not only a new work but a new work built on a new technique, custom-made for the composer’s experience of the catastrophe, is created. This modeling of the catastrophe and subsequent capturing of disintegration gave the composer control over a disintegrative process at a time when a real-world disintegration going on around him was completely out of his control. This intense relationship between composer, event, and artwork suggests the possibility that not only can The Disintegration Loops help Basinski through his personal memories, but the work could also potentially affect the collective memory, that is that the coping effect that The Disintegration Loops had for its composer could be extended to the rest of humanity affected by the catastrophe it was spawned from.

Peruse the full paper below.

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Path

The New York-based, “lung-powered music” ensemble loadbang was in residency for several days at University of Virginia this year, and they performed my work “Path” for ensemble and live electronics.

The instrumentation of the ensemble is unique: high baritone voice, trumpet, trombone, and bass clarinet. I decided early on to treat the voice as another instrument, that is to not divide the group into solo voice with instrumental accompaniment. To reinforce this, the singer uses no text and instead uses different vowels for timbral variety (mimicking the timbral variety introduced in the brass through different kinds of muting). I also decided to make the material of the piece very simple: diatonic pitch collections in Ab and D. This allowed me to focus on texture and form.

The resulting piece is meditative and moody, switching from sections of resonant drone to chaotic, improvised textures and back again. The electronics of the piece incorporate electronic drones and pastoral recordings made on the East coast.