Lo Spazio tra le Pietre

I composed Lo spazio tra le pietre (The Space between the Stones) for the "Music and Architecture" event, organized by the Bonporti Conservatory of Trento and Riva del Garda on October 18, 2008.

From my perspective, the relationship between music and architecture is not limited to the important issue of designing spaces for music, but has deeper aspects that certainly affect the composition and extend to its fruition.
If, on the one hand, a building exists statically in space, it cannot be appreciated in its entirety without a temporal interval. Its overall form is never fully evident, not even from above. It forms in the memory of those who have approached it from many sides and have seen its form fade away, while the construction details and then the materials become increasingly evident. Similarly, a piece of music exists statically in some form of notation and is revealed over time. Temporal listening gradually highlights its internal structure, its constituent elements, and its details.
Thus, it's possible to think of a piece of music as a static object and a building as a dynamic structure. But it's from a compositional perspective that the analogies become closer.

Compositionally, when I work with completely synthetic sounds that don't derive from any real sound, as in the case of this piece, I generally follow a top-down approach. I first imagine a form, often in spatial terms, and then I construct the materials and methods with which to realize it.
So, as in architecture, for me composing a piece means building the basic materials starting from the minimal components and modulating the temporal and spatial void that separates them, trying to assemble them into a coherent environment.
The parameters I manipulate, as in instrumental music, are temporal and spatial, but, unlike instrumental music, they extend to the microscopic level. Thus, the manipulation of time does not stop at the durations of the notes, but reaches the attack and decay times of the individual components of each sound (the harmonic or inharmonic partials). Similarly, on a spatial level, my intervention is not limited to the interval, which determines the character of harmonic relationships, but extends to the distance between the partials that form a single sound, determining, to a certain extent, its timbre.
The point, however, is that, in my vision of composition, the methods are much more important than the materials. Indeed, even the materials themselves ultimately derive from the methods. My problem, in fact, is never that of writing a sequence of sounds and developing it, but rather that of generating a surface, a "texture," with a precise perceptual value.
In reality, this is texture music. Even when you think you're hearing a single sound, you're actually hearing at least four or five. And I'm not talking about partials, but rather complex sounds, each of which has a minimum of four partials and a maximum of about thirty. For example, the initial G sharp, which arises from nothing and is then surrounded by other notes (F, Bb, F sharp, A), is composed of eight notes with very little difference in pitch that are renewed every 0.875 seconds. This creates the perception of a single sound, but one with a certain type of internal movement.
Texture music, micro-polyphony that moves far below the threshold of basic 12th temperament. In fact, here I work with an octave divided into 1,000 equal parts, and at certain points in the piece, thousands of complex sounds coexist simultaneously to generate a single "crash."
It follows that it is not possible to write such a "score" by hand. I personally designed and programmed a compositional software called AlGen (AlgorithmGeneration), through which I control the masses and the computer generates the details (the individual sounds).
AlGen already existed in 1984 and had been used to compose Wires, to which this piece owes a lot. However, while at the time it was just a routine block that I had connected to Barry Vercoe's Music360 synthesis program (the direct ancestor of today's CSound), for this occasion it was completely rewritten and is a standalone software. In its current version, it incorporates various probabilistic distributions, serial methods, linear and nonlinear algorithms to better control the generated surfaces and, above all, their evolution (for once, fractals are out of the picture, for now).

Nevertheless, AlGen does not incorporate any form of "intelligence." It does not make decisions based on harmony, context, etc. It is a blind executor of orders. It draws from a probabilistic set or calculates functions and generates notes, but fortunately, it does not think or decide. What it deals with are pure numbers, and it doesn't even know whether it's calculating durations, densities, or frequencies. Consequently, full responsibility for the final result lies solely with me. When I listen to a sound mass and look back at the numbers I've fed into the program, I understand perfectly why it sounds that way, and that's the only way I can make the necessary corrections.

"Lo Spazio tra le Pietre" was composed in my studio in September–October 2008 and synthesized into 4 channels using CSound. Synthesis algorithm: simple FM. CSound score generated using the author's computer-aided composition software AlGen.

The entire piece is conceived as a spatial structure. Its skyline is evident in the sonogram at the top of the page, and its structure, as an alternation of shapes, solids and voids, is clearly visible in the enlargement of a fragment lasting about a minute (below; as usual, you can click on the images to enlarge them).

Mauro Graziani – Lo Spazio tra le Pietre (2008), computer music

I forgot: with normal computer cassettes you hear about half as much.

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