Metanoisa combines two words, metanoia and noise. While metanoia has many
meanings in different contexts, for this piece, it connotes a sense of change in one's perspective specifically in relation
to listening to music. In Metanoisa, I set out to present the experience of
listening, but later came to the realization that I could only present my own experience. Metanoisa
attempts to capture the space in which this listening occurs. While listening to music, it is a common experience that
I forget my self. I become completely connected to the sounds that are surrounding me, physically and psychoacoustically.
For the piece, I placed a three-dimensional ambisonic microphone in the center of my living room and
recorded myself listening to La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, which was simply played on my home stereo.
The recording thus consists of any background noises such as a dripping faucet and cars passing by on the street and La Monte
Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano. This recording became the canvas on which I composed my piece. In the piece,
the listener should feel as if sitting in a virtual room listening to music. As the piece progresses, the ambient noises
move to the foreground and The Well-Tuned Piano moves to the background and vice versa. Each will momentarily be inaudible
because often as you forget yourself, you forget your senses as well and sounds simply pass over you without there being a
conscious “you” to remember them. Toward the end of the piece, through spectral analysis and placing copies
of the recording in different orientations in space, the listener becomes literally inside The Well-Tuned Piano both in space
and in spectrum. Sound intensities surround the listener which facilitates the movement toward the self-forgetfulness
of both listener and virtual listener.
Metanoisa functions
in two distinct ways. It is a connection between La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano and the virtual listener
inside the piece itself. It shows how The Well-Tuned Piano functions in relation to the listener, namely, the awareness
and subsequent lack of awareness of one's body. The second way is the connection between the actual piece itself (Metanoisa)
and the real listener external to the piece. This depends more on the listener than on the piece, and the function of
which should be determined on a case by case basis. The idea is for the second function to connect with the first, for
the real listener to connect with the virtual listener, thus creating a metaself-forgetfulness. “And it is necesary
to reach that point, it is necessary for the nonmusical sound of the human being to form a block with the becoming-music of
sound, for them to confront and embrace each other like two wrestlers who can no longer break free from each other’s
grasp,” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus) forming a connection as each is drawn into a becoming; the becoming-music
of sound and the becoming-sound of body.
The version here is UHJ stereo, which can be converted
back to B-format. For those who want a full B-format version, you can ask.
The piece was
completed in part with the support of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, University of Washington.
The
piece was premiered at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) 2009 in Montreal, Canada at McGill University.
