by Margaret Schedel
Collaborator: James Harley

Cryptomnesia Diary

The first time I listened to the field recording given to me by Jim Harley I noticed all the background sounds interfering with the monks singing and was somewhat disappointed in the sample. But the more I listened the more I understood that those interferences gave the recording a real sense of place. I decided to take this opportunity to give the recording a different sense of place—situating the recording in an electro-acoustic setting. I wanted to keep the rhythmic nature of the original so I took the last thirty seconds of the sample and used phase vocoding to extend it to 4 minutes and thirty seconds. The windowing gives a sense of pulse, in keeping with the original recording. I used amp modeling to burnish the sound with an electronic sheen. I incorporated plate reverb to make it sound more metallic, and used granular synthesis with random grain lengths to deconstruct the sound. After a lot of equalization, I used pitch shifting in octaves and chorus on the sound in order to thicken it up again. The basic process involved carving away the original sound and then adding more electronically. I have titled the piece Cryptomnesia, a form of inadvertent plagiarism where memories appear as original creations. In this case the original sample was not mine, but I worked with it so much I feel connected to it and almost forgot that I didn’t make the recording.

Margaret Anne Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media. Her works have been performed throughout the United Stated and abroad. While working towards a DMA in music composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, her interactive multimedia opera, A King Listens, premiered at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and was profiled by apple.com. She is working towards a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle. She serves as the musical director for Kinesthetech Sense and sits on the boards of 60x60 Dance, the BEAM Foundation, the Electronic Music Foundation Institute, the International Computer Music Association, the New West Electronic Art and Music Organization, and Organized Sound. She contributed a chapter to the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music and her article on generative multimedia was recently published in Contemporary Music Review. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para la Música y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. In 2009 she won the first Ruth Anderson Prize for her interactive installation Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair. As an Assistant Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she serves as Co-Director of Computer Music and is a core faculty member of cDACT, the consortium for digital art, culture and technology.
 

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