Jonathan Harvey: “Speakings”
Usher Hall, August 2011
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Sound By Design were approached by the Edinburgh International Festival to supply equipment for a performance of Jonathan Harvey’s work for Electronics and Orchestra in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh as part of the festival series. Having worked on the premier performance of the piece in the BBC Proms 2008, and a further performance in Glasgow City Halls in 2009, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra recommended Sound By Design to the Festival committee as a preferred supplier.
The composition “Speakings” is about language, the piece has three sections. The first is the birth of language, an introduction lasting about three or four minutes. The second is about the development and evolution of language, which occupies the long central section of the piece, for about 15 minutes. And the third is about the establishment of language. Jonathan described it as “the most complicated and ambitious composition I have ever written”. The piece was written in conjunction with a French team of engineers at ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique), the elite research centre founded by Pierre Boulez, with which Harvey has been associated for many decades. They developed a technique called “Shape Vocoding”, a filtering process, with music being fed into the computer through one input, and speech, with its more rapidly changing shapes, being fed into another. The two are married, with the faster speech shaping the dominant partner. The resultant mix is that you can hear the sound of, say, an oboe playing which will uncannily appear to have adopted some of the characteristics of a voice, or at least a mouth. Most of the digital sound transformation is applied to 11 solo instruments, each of which has its own microphone. The signals are fed to a computer, which instantly sends the transformed sound into the hall through loudspeakers. But the other instruments will also be captured by microphones, so there will be moments when the entire orchestra seems to "speak". Sound By Design supplied a DiGiCo D1 digital mixing console along with infrastructure such as Apogee AD/ DA converters to allow interface with the ircam computers. Project Manager Griff Hewis and Chris Beddall travelled to Scotland for a week to attend rehearsals and show, delivering a complete surround sound system for the festival, all time aligned and balanced with the use of SMAART measurement software. |
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