Daniel Formo: Using speech as source material for making improvised music

Abstract

This talk will be about the artistic research project The Music of Language and Language of Music (2013-2018), and how that project explored the underlying musical structures of speech as source material for creating music – not what is said, but how it is said, what in linguistics is called prosody. Part of this project involved developing an instrument for real time analysis and transformation of such speech features into musical structures for use in the improvised performance concept The Orchestra of Speech. This lecture will focus on the sound design decisions and the mappings strategies used in this project.

Bio

Daniel Formo is a musician, composer and researcher working within a broad range of music from improvised and written contemporary music, to jazz and popular genres, as well as electroacoustic music and electronic art.

Literature

• Documentation of the artistic research project
• A compact description of just the instrument system
• Some background on the concept of prosody

 

This is a guest lecture in the course MCT4046.