Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

Music is the embodiment of the intelligence that exists in sound.
- Hoëné Wronski (1776-1853).

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
and Eternity in an hour
- William Blake: from Auguries of Innocence (from the Pickering MS).

While attempting to penetrate the mysteries of Frequency Modulation sound synthesis on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer - preparatory to composing the tape part of my multimedia piece Arcturus Timespace (1987) - I was distracted by the potentialities of synthesizing DX7 sounds that evolve meaningfully over unusually long periods: spanning minutes instead of seconds! (For the benefit of the technically inquisitive, such slow timbral germination required painstaking adjustments of, and infinitesimal disparities between, [low] envelope-generator rates, the operator output levels and their detunings, and very careful specification of Low Frequency Oscillator settings that act upon both pitch- and amplitude-modulation parameters.) Anyway, Ian Fredericks, then Director of the Sydney University Experimental Sound Studio [SUESS] where I was carrying out this research, remarked positively upon one of these DX7 voices, to the effect that: "this isn't just a Yamaha DX7 sound, it's a whole god-damned piece!". At the time, in 1986, I stupidly thought nothing of Ian's perspicacious observation - until a decade or so later, when I stumbled upon this work once again. Of course, he's right! So, now fully appreciating Mr Fredericks' insightfulness, I tweaked a couple of parameters and named the thing Cosmos (One Note) ... because that's exactly what it is. Closer to the time of its première, I mischievously savoured the likelihood that Cosmos (One Note) may just 'put a cat amongst the pigeons': given many commentator-pundits' current fetish for constructing often chimeric musical taxonomies, I relished the difficulty they might have in 'pigeon-holing' this piece ("minimalist in its performative action, but maximalist in its acoustical inner life - so just what do we label it?"); moreover - to invoke the ungainly jargon of musicological new-speak - because of the Yamaha DX7 keyboardist's almost complete physical immobility, Cosmos (One Note) 'problematizes' the spectacle of live performance. But such academicism does not really concern me here. I merely invite you to explore the sonic universe of this "whole god-damned piece", moment-by-moment, with your minds and ears rather than your eyes...
© Ian Shanahan, Sydney, Australia; 28 January 1999.

Work Details

Year: 1997

Instrumentation: Yamaha DX7 keyboard synthesizer (or software synthesizer equivalent).

Duration: 5 min.

Difficulty: Easy — Only a single key is depressed and held down.

Dedication note: To Ό Παναγιος [To The All-Holy].

First performance: by Ian Shanahan — 13 Nov 97. “Sound Kitchen” concert held at The Performance Space, in the Department of Music, School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney (Nepean), Kingswood, Sydney