Tahiti
Jan 18, 2022, 02:01 PM
""Tahiti" is a sound abstraction based on a short fragment of "Radio Tahiti" broadcast in the 19 meter band where popular music is heard with brief spoken descriptions in-between. The composition reflects artistically on the distortion experienced by a message through a variable and unpredictable channel like radio transmission in the bands below 30 Mhz, conditioned by the time of day, the time of year, the location of the receiver and the ionospheric propagation conditions, ultimately dependent on solar activity.
Based on the prototypical sound profile that these conditions cause in the reception of shortwave (where the main signal is altered with electrical noises, fading, interferences, echoes and overlaps of random appearance and durations), the work reinterprets the original sound material from a double perspective, timbral and temporal, creating a new discourse that, nevertheless, maintains the essence of the *continuum* sound of popular music from the South Pacific.
The work is based on three sound textures. The main one recalls the timbral essence of the stringed instruments of the popular Polynesian music, as well as the peculiar inflection of its glissandos but transformed in two directions: on the one hand, turning the non-stop accompaniment of these instruments into a set of bursts that generate a new fluffy texture, alternating presences and absences, as if undergoing the effects of ionospheric fading; on the other, altering its spectral composition to create a distorted timbral (applying transformations similar to those experienced by the radio signal received thousands of kilometers away) that recalls its original melodic inflections.
Fragments of the spoken material manipulated by different spectral transformations are arranged randomly on the main texture, in the same way that interferences and other electrical disturbances modify the main speech. The voice also appears in the central part of the work, but now converted into endless echoes and rebounds like those produced by propagation through the long and short path, a common effect in shortwave listening."
Based on the prototypical sound profile that these conditions cause in the reception of shortwave (where the main signal is altered with electrical noises, fading, interferences, echoes and overlaps of random appearance and durations), the work reinterprets the original sound material from a double perspective, timbral and temporal, creating a new discourse that, nevertheless, maintains the essence of the *continuum* sound of popular music from the South Pacific.
The work is based on three sound textures. The main one recalls the timbral essence of the stringed instruments of the popular Polynesian music, as well as the peculiar inflection of its glissandos but transformed in two directions: on the one hand, turning the non-stop accompaniment of these instruments into a set of bursts that generate a new fluffy texture, alternating presences and absences, as if undergoing the effects of ionospheric fading; on the other, altering its spectral composition to create a distorted timbral (applying transformations similar to those experienced by the radio signal received thousands of kilometers away) that recalls its original melodic inflections.
Fragments of the spoken material manipulated by different spectral transformations are arranged randomly on the main texture, in the same way that interferences and other electrical disturbances modify the main speech. The voice also appears in the central part of the work, but now converted into endless echoes and rebounds like those produced by propagation through the long and short path, a common effect in shortwave listening."
Composition by Javier Suarez-Quiros.
Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave