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CHREIAI (14:41)
1996
an electroacoustic composition for two-channel playback based upon a gnostic text

Chreiai is an attempt at the cybernetic exegesis of a Gnostic text probably written between the second and fourth centuries AD. It is from the Gospel of Thomas as found amongst the Nag Hammadi scrolls discovered in Egypt in 1947. I worked with an English translation from the discovered Coptic version of what may have been originally composed in Greek or Aramaic. My interest was in using the computational power of the digital computer to perform audio manipulations of the text in a manner that might unpack its meaning through a rigorous and didactic analytical process. The text was chosen not because I understood its meaning but precisely because I did not. My hope has been to not merely elucidate deeper levels of linguistic code embedded in the text's grammar and syntax but more profoundly to slice open a receptacle of encoded thought enmeshed in the carrier wave of spoken language, thereby revealing something of what Terrence McKenna has called the "superconducting lens of translinguistic matter generated out of the body of each of us." The composition began with the parsing of the text into a phonetic matrix. This analysis revealed embedded structural patterns over time that could be articulated by a variety of DSP transformations of the text and its constituent phonemes. Over the surface of these transforms, the original text is heard repeated 33 times, but with each repetition the text is "passed through" an FFT-based digital filter derived from one of the 33 phonemes comprising the text in their proper order of occurrence. In other words, the entire composition is generated from a single reading of the text and its phonetic content, subjected to a set of rigorous transformations suggested by and found within the structure of the text itself. Time-stretched versions of individual phonemes and complete words were used to articulate the extension of structural aspects implied by the matrix. Multiple levels of DSP transformations were similarly derived based upon hierarchies of interconnection between phonemes as revealed by the analysis.

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from At The Margin of The Sensate, released April 15, 2023

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David Dunn New Mexico

David Dunn was born in 1953 in San Diego, CA. From 1970 to 1974 he was assistant to the American composer Harry Partch & remained active as a performer in the Harry Partch Ensemble for over a decade. He has worked in a wide variety of audio media inclusive of traditional & experimental music, installations for public exhibitions, video & film soundtracks, radio broadcasts, & bioacoustic research. ... more

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