S o u n d   B i t e

You can read all about Sound Bite in this article that I wrote for Experimental Musical Instruments.

It was a kind of a pioneering application, I'm working on bringing it up into the 21st century. The original ran on an Amiga 1000 with about 2Meg of memory, at about 14KHz, mono. Later it ran on an Amiga 3000 with about 6 meg of memory.
Some of these pieces were put on public display at the Jersey City Museum, in September 2005 under the name "STUCK IN YOUR HEAD".

Here are some examples of Sound Bite.
 
Belief Boy of Music, Dec 15, 1988
One of the very best things I made with Sound Bite. The source material is an interview from WNYC's New Sounds program, between the host, John Schaefer, and the guest, downtown composer Glenn Branca. Just prior to this interview, John Cage had made this infamous remark about Branca's Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses in at 1982's New Music America:
"My feelings were disturbed ... I found in myself a willingness to connect the music with evil and with power. I don't want such a power in my life. If it was something political it would resemble fascism" (John Cage, 1982).

Cage later changed his mind about Branca's music - but the old quotation is the one that sticks. Branca's natural nervousness and laughter and the contrast between the two voices were really good "food" for Sound Bite.
 
Belief Boy of Music is in four movements. Each movement uses different parameters for the sound generation. Presto, for example, used very short sound bites.
 
  1. Belief Boy Of Music (3:28)
  2. Bad Belief (4:33)
  3. Belief Bucket (1:59)
  4. Presto (2:22)
Read My Lips, Dec 28, 1988
That ol' President Bush (pére) made his macho promise that he would not propose new taxes on some campaign stomp. This audio is some NPR analysis of that little artifact of a bygone campaign, words which later Bush had to eat.
 
Read My Lips!
 
Sublime Message 1992
If you have heard the CD TRANSFORMS, CUNEIFORM 55011, by Dr. Nerve and friends, you may note that I had a 7 second cut on there. The original is 4 minutes and 12 seconds long, and here it is. Sublime Message was mostly made by feeding my program Sound Bite samples of George Bush (I)'s speech on the invasion of Panama and the obligatory Dr. Nerve samples from BETA 14 OK, and some spectrographically encoded subliminal messages created by Vapor Paint. Mixed by Brooks Williams at the Harmonic Ranch, 1992
 
Sublime Message
 
and here ARE those sublime, spectrographically encoded messages:
St. Peter's Tour
The sound is taken from an audio tour guide tape of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. I like the way the words flow into each other.
 
St. Peter's Tour
 
Day Of theDead (excerpt) Oct 28, 1989
Part of a sound collage made for the Day of the Dead Party in 1989. Sound Bite is used in a mix with HARM, RGS and the Amiga's computer generated voice.
 
Day Of theDead (excerpt) 5:29
 
Call Ya Later
Cell phone half conversations recorded off the higher UHF channels.
 
Call Ya Later mp3, 2' 17"


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Henry Lowengard, jhhl-at-panix.com
324 Wall St #5 / Kingston NY 12401 /
© 1988-2006 Henry Lowengard