Hidden traces is a piece for guitar and electronics. It is an open-form piece – approximately 12/15 minutes – written for and premiered at the Belgian Art Gallery Be-Part in Warengem, on April 27th, 2019. In Hidden traces the sonic world of the guitar is explored through a reinterpretation of some idiomatic actions and sound gestures, revealing the nature of the instrument from a different perspective. The dialogue between the performer and the instrument is mediated by the use of the piezoelectric microphone, which discloses new sound qualities, enriched by some real-time sound processing.
The technical setup consists of two transducers and two piezoelectric microphones. The transducers are placed on the soundboard of the guitar, and they work as loudspeakers to amplify both the instrumental and live-processed sound through the body of the guitar. The two piezos are, instead, employed with two different functions: the first one is used to play on the strings and on various points of the surface of the guitar, while the second one has to be fixed on the soundboard to act as a “listener”, providing information for the electronics. Beyond the exploration of new affordances of the guitar through the use of piezo, I was interested in exploiting primarily the resonant properties of this instrument, experimenting with a few electronic solutions that I had never used before. The amplification through the transducers allows for making the guitar body resonate differently, according to the specificities of the sound material provided. Therefore I decided to enlarge the spectrum of sound sources conveyed to the transducers, using four different categories of sound material:
- sounds produced by the actions of the performer;
- sounds produced by different electronic processes on the material recorded in real-time;
- electronically generated sounds (such as sinewaves);
- pre-recorded material.
As already mentioned in ch. 3.4, Hidden traces is an open-form piece, for which the performer receives a set of indications regarding the formal structure (see Hidden Traces Notes). The latter consists of three main sections and the set of instructions gives information on the timing for using a certain number of pre-determined processes and materials. The piece should start by creating an initial texture of noisy sounds, which has to move gradually towards a polyphony of more pitched sounds, through the possibility of freezing some guitar sounds and playing back different sinewaves, which will differently resonate with the tuning of the strings. The pre-recorded material starts appearing from the middle of the piece, and it consists of human voices that slowly emerge from the sound texture. The pre-recorded sounds are fragments belonging to different radio shows, broadcasted by Radio Ghetto.* The fragments selected for Hidden traces are in different languages and their content is never recognizable during the piece. The dynamic and the duration of the reproduction of these “traces” depends on certain parameters of the sound gestures produced by the moving piezo, identified by the fixed one, which "listens" to how the guitar is resonating. The control is therefore left to the performer, who can decide how much of these fragments should emerge from the sound texture.
*(note: Radio Ghetto is a project of participated radio, which aims to give a voice to the farmhands living in the rural area around Foggia, in the south of Italy. It has been created in 2012, by the association Rete Campagne in Lotta, to give a voice to the community of rural laborers. All radio shows are directly curated by the people living in these communities, and they host debates, discussions about problems related to migratory experiences, stories of everyday life, music contests, etc).
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