Duration: 6 minutes
Performed by the composer.
Program Note
The title of this piece, for laptop and voice, comes from the opening of Octavia E. Butler’s acclaimed sci-fi novel Parable of the Sower. Against a dystopian backdrop of climate catastrophe, Butler directly interrogates the feedback cycles formed between personal belief, agency, and action, writing:
All that you touch
You change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
In an era where we are a part of evermore complex, unstable, and invisible cycles of feedback, what would happen if we render our control of a cycle of feedback more visible and tangible? How do our senses shape our perception, and does that shape the cycle?
This piece utilizes a custom laptop synthesis instrument that makes the laptop speaker gesture-responsive with no external hardware through feedback. The electronic sounds are synthesized and processed by live laptop feedback, shaped by the performer’s hands. Sound is emitted from the laptop’s left speaker, reflects off the surface of the hands, and returns to the laptop’s microphone, where it is transposed to create recursive, fractal, intervallic patterns. Different proximities, hand-shapes, and gestures impact the sound of the feedback cue to acoustic phenomena such as diffraction, resonance, and deflection.
The sound of the feedback behaves in unexpected ways: patterns manifest quickly and melt away; nearly imperceptible motions instigate tidal change, and stillness, rather than motion, sustains and intensifies the cycle.