Tickling forest is an electroacoustic piece written for an eight-channel surround system. The piece should have been performed in SARC in 2020 by Juan Parra Cancino, but due to the Covid pandemic the performance did not take place. For this reason I decided to make an alternative ambisonic version of the piece, which can be listened to through headphones. As I have briefly described in ch.3.5, the composition of Tickling Forest consisted of many different steps, starting from the selection of nineteen different sound materials stored in my personal archive. All these samples (audio example 4.7.1-4.7.19) come from recordings I made during the compositional process of different pieces, so they are all sounds recorded with piezo and most of them are sounds produced with piezo, specifically on guitar, violin, piano, double bass and güiro. All these samples underwent an electronic process, mainly consisting of filtering and different kinds of granulation. As a result all processed samples present different morphologies, consisting of the combination of different registers, dynamics, material qualities, behaviours, going from a more textural to a more gestural one – when samples have a clear rhythmical profile –, and so on. Consequently, according to their specific features, the processed samples have been organized within a formal structure, following principles of analogy, opposition, transformation, density variation, and so on. The formal structure of Tickling forest, unlike most of my pieces, is almost circular rather than linear, meaning that it is not necessary to listen to it from the beginning to the end, but that the piece (almost 10 minutes long) might be repeated in loop, inhabiting the space where it is performed.
A peculiarity of this work is that during the compositional process, I did not produce a score: the project of the piece was created directly in the editing program (Reaper). A scheme of the piece was deduced only after its composition, from the final version of the fixed media. It mostly delivers information about when samples appears and how are they distributed around the eight channel surround system (see pdf 4.7). Movements of the samples are of different kinds: they might be played back as a point from a single loudspeaker, or they can move from a loudspeaker to another one, also making a full circle (clockwise or counterclockwise); they can otherwise move covering a specific angle, or they could be assigned to a stereo pair or to a specific section of loudspeakers. The acoustic space is therefore constantly reshaped by multiple combinations of different sound materials.
The composition of this work has been an important moment of reflection and further research concerning my own practice. It has first of all been relevant, as pointed out in ch.3.5, the attitude of deliberate exploitation of my personal archive, supported by the awareness of the importance of such a methodology of working. It has been moreover important to think about sonorous space from another perspective. In fact, during the compositional process, the formal organization has responded not only to the need of understanding of the implicit or imposed morphological properties of the different sound materials, but it has also followed spatial criteria, considering the trajectories and the quality of the movements of the sound in the space. The aim was to create a listening environment, within which each piezo sound material I was working with, indulges a different proxemics, depending on its own specific characteristics.
