The Alchemist’s Flame
⌊ Digital music composition.
The sonorities in this piece were created using a technique known as granular synthesis. This method of sound synthesis allows the creation of sounds which may sometimes seem organic, but which are in fact created entirely in the digital domain using computers. The process involves breaking existing sounds into very short sonic particles, which our human aural perception (in its static temporal continuum) are unable to perceive, just as our eyes are unable to see the individual cells that make up an organism. These “soundgrains” are then recombined into more complex and dynamic acoustic events. In The Alchemist’s Flame, these larger acoustic events are recombined as if they too were grains, forming a micro-macrocosmic relationship between the individual sound particles and the larger acoustic events.