Black Vox

This work is a quasi-improvisational performance for Peacock, a self-designed box-shaped sensor-based interface. This interface detects the movements of a performer‘s hands by employing thirty-five infrared sensors. The output from the sensors is mapped to more than three-hundred parameters of a synthesizer, running on a Pd-extended patch. The mapping between data from the sensors and the parameters of the synthesizer gradually varies as the piece unfolds. The synthesizer generates electronic sound, employing the phase-bash synthesis technique based on six seconds of prerecorded spoken voice. Thus, the sound produced by the synthesizer is always readily associable to the sonority of the human voice, though often highly distorted or modulated. Moreover, the synthesizer allows the performer to control a maximum of five voices simultaneously and enables him/her to create flexible homophonic and polyphonic textures. In order to achieve a more organic sonority, a number of chaos attractors were developed as external objects in Pd-extended by the author, and these attractors are utilized for randomizing several parameters of the synthesizer in various sections of the work