The chatter quartet

In The Chatter Quartet, for string quartet and laptop, I attempted to extract musical aspects of pre-recorded, idiosyncratic moments of heightened speech, and use the pitch content and rhythm found in chosen speech samples as the basis of musical material written for a string quartet, accompanied by pre-recorded speaking. One of my goals was to decontextualize these aurally unusual moments, and create new perceptual implications based on the musical elements discovered in the sounds, rather than the words themselves. Another goal was to create a unique sound palette, the rules of which were governed only by the interaction of rhythms, tones and timbres. This piece is part of a series of works I have been writing, each of which features a marriage between acoustic instruments and pre-recorded sounds. In the first such piece, Doppelganger, for clarinet and pre-recorded clarinet, I contrasted an acoustic instrument with itself, pre-recorded, and highlighted similarities between the two, as well as the unique potential of both the acoustic instrument, performed live, and its laptop-based, electronically triggered counterpart. The moments of face-to-face confrontation between such closely related sound entities, emanating from extremely different sources (breath and a resonating column of air vs. MIDI controlled digital samples) created an exciting dramatic and musical tension. Though it is part of the same theme of electroacoustic exploration in my work, in The Chatter Quartet, my approach and motivations were wholly different. Rather than beginning with the sound of the string quartet, or any of the individual instruments, I began with voices I had heard on the radio or television. It occurred to me that, at times, when I am listening to the radio or watching political broadcasts, my mind drifts. In these moments, I am still acutely aware of the sounds of the broadcasted voices, but I am no longer listening to, or comprehending, their words. Consequently, speaking voices assume the role of lulling musical instruments, rather than sources of cognitively useful or evocative information. (See more in text.)